SebastianP

So the question of "why is the Macross 29 fleet disliked" came up on another forum, which got me curious - *is* the Macross 29 fleet actually disliked, canonically?

Given that there were only eight performances and no recordings made, there's precious little information to go on, and of the three places I've found in English discussing the actual thing, none of them really says anything about their relationships with other colonies.

Macrosswiki and Gubabablog says "they're pacifist, and facing economic trouble", while Decultureshock says "without any form of military to boost its economy [Macross 29] has found itself slipping into a recession". 

This is in contrast with the usual interpretations and explanations I hear from Western fans who never saw the source: "They're in trouble because other people won't trade with them because they refuse to defend themselves". None of that is mentioned in the summaries made by people who were there.

And the "other people won't trade with them or gives them bad deals" take rhymes very poorly with the resolution of the musical, which is "Macross 29 will establish itself as a cultural center by sending their Miss Macross winners on galactic tours and make money off the merchandise". It just sounds like they've had trouble finding something to actually sell abroad for cash to replace their military-industrial complex. 

So, is there anything in any of the side materials/unofficial books (Master File, etc) that suggests no one likes Macross 29, or is this a figment of the Western fandom where pacifists are considered stupid?

15 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

So you'll follow a demonstrably incorrect methodology and when you don't get the answer you want you blame the official information instead?

The issue is that I'm trying to figure out what the specs are for a ship (the Stealth Cruiser) where we never got any, and all I have to go on is feature comparison. It's the only methodology I *can* use, but the models aren't built in a way that lets me get an easy answer, which is why I'm irritated about it.

Which means that I go with my gut feeling that the internal scale, which matched for four other ships, was correct; and that the cruiser is 316 meters long, its main guns are 80 mm-ish (instead of 72 mm) and it has 40 mm point defense guns instead of 20 mm. 

As for me not being happy with the official information... will you accept that there is conflict between the features given on the 3D models, the sizes given for those 3D models, and events happening in the anime? Namely, that Rabbit 1 has no way of getting to the deck of the ARMD-L with the elevators we can see, and there is no room to put an elevator that is big enough for Rabbit 1 in any place where it can actually retract into anything, so long as the ship is 472 meters long and the VB-6 is 30 meters?

There are three possible resolutions to the conflict:

Option 1: the size given for the ship is incorrect, and it is enough larger that the VB-6 actually can launch from it. 

Option 2: the hangar capacity is incorrect, and the ship only carries those mecha that actually fit in real life - basically only Skull Squadron, no Rabbit 1 and likely no Pixie squad either. 

Option 3: the specs are all correct, but the 3D model is incorrect to the point where we have no idea what the Quarter really looks like. 

Given Kawamori's statements about how the shows are dramatizations, Option 2 is likely the "correct" answer, but that still means the specs are wrong and so is the plot. Option 3 is unquantifiable, it invalidates the visuals we have entirely. Option 1 is something I can explore because I have the models and can experiment with them. But the conflict is there, and real, and *something* is off about the official information because all of it cannot be correct at the same time due to inconsistency. 

I can do similar setups for the other ships where there is inconsistency, like the amazing shrinking Macross Elysion, (I can also see Actual Max Jenius watching the Stargazer episode of Macross 7 and going "that's not how we did it, even I couldn't do that, and that's flat impossible" about the whole "let's launch 30-something large fighters out of the tiny missile launchers on a tiny frigate, instead of using an actual carrier", like one of those "actual fighter pilot reacts to movie" youtube things...)

1 hour ago, darkranger12 said:

About the VF-31 Armored Seigfried and Kairos.   Do we know what the two Missile launchers attacted to the  boosters are called?

 

According to the photos of the toy, all the decals say APS-31/W, rather than having different designations for each part. I haven't found any other info yet, but then I don't have the VF-31 Master File, either version. 

5 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

... the models for the ships aren't even accurately scaled in the games themselves, and the reused/shared features between ships in the animation were never scaled the same from the start.  I thought everyone knew this, TBH.  Macross Delta in particular certainly wasn't subtle about it.

Sure, but I couldn't *prove* it before I had the models on hand. Now I do, and now I know for sure.

5 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Guantanamo-class Advanced ARMD or Guantanamo-class space stealth carrier.

Also, it's "Maizuru" not "Maiduru".  In Macross 7, there was some theme naming going on with ships.  The few named Guantanamo-class ships are named for port cities with either naval bases or shipyards.  ARMD-362 Maizuru's named for Maizuru in Kyoto, which was home to the Maizuru Naval Arsenal that built ships for Imperial Japan and now is home to civilian shipbuilding concerns.

It may have been meant to be "Maizuru". What's written on the actual ship model - both in the anime and in the game - is "MAIDURU". On all of them. Because we see two in the same shot with the name visible in the opening scene of Itsuwari no Utahime, and at least a couple of ships pass by outside the window while Hayate and Freyja are talking before the final battle in Zettai Live, at least one of which has the name visible. And in the game, the "MAIDURU" is baked into the main texture of the ship, rather than being a decal like the hull numbers on the Aether/Hemera or the NUNS logo on the side of the frigate (which was traded for a Xaos logo on some ships in Delta during the muster in episode 10-ish). 

I'll chalk this up to a weird typo in transliteration that no one ever bothered correcting.

5 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Or that the parts were never intended to be the exact same part, and simply followed the same basic design.

 

When the parts are identical in shape and use the same textures like the point defense guns do, I'm going to assume that they were meant to be the same guns first. And then give up trying to rationalize it and go "the tech specs are useless" even harder. 

5 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

It has its own elevator in the middle of the deck.

Where?

It can't go aft of the two existing main elevators of the ARMD-L, because behind those there's nothing underneath the flight deck as that's where the Quarter sticks its hand for ship mode.

It can't go *forward* of those elevators because that's where the hangar is, and a Monster-sized elevator would eat half of it - plus the wings would poke through because the VB-6 is ginormous and the hull is narrow.

It can't be the existing elevators because they're physically not large enough. 

And of course, it's not marked on the flight deck on any version of the Quarter I've found pictures of. 

The only way to get a VB-6 under the deck of the ARMD-L is if they made a serious typo when statting out the ship and made its overall length into what the overall *height* was supposed to be. At that point the stock elevators are big enough, and the hangar wide enough, and there'll still be room for other aircraft in the hangar. 

I've been playing around a little with the ship models that were extracted from the PS3/PSV games, and my conclusion is that scaling the ships by features is not viable since the ships use similar features but at different scales.

For example, the NUNS cruiser reuses multiple features from the NUNS frigate, but they're individually scaled differently. 

There are four ships that all scale to about 400% of the official size as imported in my 3D software - the Battle 21, the Battle 25, the NUNS frigate, and the Maiduru escort carrier (2059 Guantanamo). The NUNS cruiser, if scaled by the same factor that gives me an accurate overall size down to the meter for the other four, comes out to 316 meters long.

But I noticed that several features are larger on the cruiser than they ought to be if they're the same ones as on the frigates:

If I want to match the size of the main turrets of the cruiser to the size of the 72 mm turrets on the frigate, the entire ship has to be scaled down to 87%, and ends up around 280 meters long.

If I want to match the size of the outrigger pods of the cruiser to the size of the outrigger pods of the frigate, the entire ship has to be scaled down to 72%, and the cruiser ends up at 227 meters.

If I want to match the size of the point defense turrets that are clustered on the ship, then the entire ship has to be scaled down to 65%, and the cruiser ends up at 208 meters. And the main turrets of the cruiser ends up just a tiny bit larger than the 58 mm beam turrets on the frigate. 

I've tried to check this against the footage in the anime, but I'm not seeing anywhere that the in-game model proportions differ significantly from the animated model.

All of which leads me to the conclusion, again, that the art team did not care if the parts were to scale as long as they looked good.

I've also come to the conclusion that the Elysion's size was changed to match the official statement after the fact. If I scale the ship by what we see in episode 2 with the Siegfrieds on the deck of Aether, the Elysion is some 14-1500 meters long in ship form and about as tall in robot form. There are scenes in the movies though that are more to scale with what was stated in interviews ("as tall as Burj Dubai" was the original quote, which was then quantified as 860 meters IIRC?), 

I really need to go rewatch the episode where Delta have their first space mission to see if the scale was changed more than once. 

And finally... if the Quarter is sub 500 meters long... where does Rabbit One launch from, because the elevators on the flight deck aren't large enough and I don't think it even fits inside the hull. König Monster is a Monster. 

4 hours ago, reaper7092 said:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/17yYXUnTRT60i6OcF6PFJJETYs-ooE5bu/view?usp=sharing
Unfortunately,I can't find the any Vajra ships in the Macross30 game 

Thank you so much for posting these beautiful beasts! That Thuverl Salan is ginormous, which is appropriate given that they're six or seven hundred meters longer than a Battle Class, 

Shame you couldn't find the Vajra assets - they're in there, I know because I've killed them in the game, but maybe they're not classed as ships? They might be under monsters or bosses or something given that they're animated characters in a way that the ships aren't. Probably located in the same structures as the Mother Dyaus boss monster. 

On 4/4/2023 at 2:31 AM, reaper7092 said:

At present, only aircraft carriers, cruisers, and destroyers have 3D model files（only 3 ship type). The biggest problem is that their point defense AA guns are scattered in different independent files, and I need to spend some time combining them. But if you don't wait, I can tell you how to extract "Macross Delta: Scramble" game files

I didn't find any other warship models in the game Macross 30. It's estimated that some models have different formats and cannot be read
 

I'll be patient and wait... Thanks for doing this anyway.

It's a shame if the other ships can't be read - Macross 30 had a Thuverl Salan and I think a couple of Vajra ships, as well as the modified frigate and the pirate ship, all of which would be very nice to have as reference material.

I hesitate to ask, because I don't want to sound like I'm begging or anything, but is there any chance you could extract the non-transforming capital ships? Northampton, Uraga, Guantanamo, Stealth Cruiser and Gefion (carrier Northampton from Macross 30) are very very much on my wishlist, and I've been trying to extract the Gefion myself but the tools I was using wouldn't work. 

Hmm, those other effects shots match the official scale better, so it's possible. Still very very iffy on the room inside of the ships though. 

I'll see what things look like once I've corrected the Quarter's scale (I had it as 460-something m)

12 hours ago, reaper7092 said:

The Koenig Monster 3D model is extracted from the macross 30 game file

all VF Armorpack are independent 3D models, need to find corresponding models and combine them without instructions

the hangar of Quarter is probably only on the left arm. However, there are many inaccuracies in the desin, like the transformation mechanism of Battle-class and elysion
I prefer the full-size 1680 meter battle-class. The size of the elysion is actually much smaller. It is 828 meters in the strong attack mode, and only 2/3 of the battle-class. Its main gun power is not enough, but its mobility will be better. It may be the abandoned case of Quarter(I can't find a clearer picture)

The OBJ file is directly exported from the "Macross Delta: Scramble" game file. The turret can be rotated and destroyed, so the 3d model file is independent, and FBX is modified and edited by me

Thanks for putting together those FBX files, then.

The official sizes of the ships are *really* not matching up with the scaling cues on them, or what's shown in the show. I'm going to see if I can put together a little demo.

I scaled the Elysion to 900 meters overall like you did in your comparison, and then put a correctly scaled VF-31E with super packs from Uta Macross at the aircraft elevators on the Hemera. 

That... does not fit. Those elevators would be unable to carry a VF-31 from the hangar to the deck because they're not big enough. 

Same with the jet blast deflectors, they're way too small, and the spacing between the catapult tracks does not work either. 

This is what the elevators look like with the Elysion at 1450 meters overall length, Notice how the elevators are now big enough to handle the aircraft...

And, the Jet Blast Deflectors are now large enough to work. Sort of. 

On the Quarter, the elevators are large enough to handle the fighters from the start with an overall ship length of 400 meters, but there's not enough room inside the hull to store the fighters. Seriously, I don't think the four fighters of Skull Squadron fit inside the amount of space available in that hull, let alone the scenes we got in the show and the movie where there a dozen fighters with space in between. The hull just isn't wide enough, because the whole carrier is only 215 meters overall, and that's counting the extension of the angled flight deck at the back. 

(I think there's also an issue with the bridge if the Elysion is just 900 meters in ship form, as I don't think it'll be tall and wide enough...)

On 3/8/2023 at 7:10 AM, reaper7092 said:

You may need a 3D model of the quarter hangar & need more work

https://drive.google.com/file/d/102xQyogFj5IvQnfjTks9jKNgbMnWblo0/view?usp=sharing

OK, so lots of questions, but the most important:

1 - Where did this Koenig Monster come from, because I can't find it in the Uta Macross rips that were posted on Reddit

2 - Is there an Armored VF-25 in your stash somewhere (also missing from the Uta Macross rips)

3 - (Not entirely seriously) Where does this ginormous hangar fit inside of the Macross Quarter if it's only 400 meters overall? (two Super VF-25s barely fit side by side on the flight deck...)

Also, compared to the Battle Frontier and the Macross Quarter, the Macross Elysion model feels kind of lackluster. All of the turrets are missing etc from the OBJ version. But it's much, much better than having *nothing* to work with. 

(Edit: The FBX version of the Elysion worked much better, all the colors in the right places and all the turrets are there). 

On 1/24/2023 at 6:22 AM, Big s said:

That might be another twenty years . Bandai has been really slow on new mg kits. Most are just rehashed parts these days 

Part of that may have to do with Covid, and part with a move towards doing more things through P-bandai (which may also be because covid.)

We've gotten 8 retail-release MG kits over the past three years (3 in 2020, 3 in 2021, and 2 in 2022), but the year before that (2019) we got seven. Also, Bandai is building a new factory that'll be online in the next couple of years. 

Anyway, what would count as an MG for Macross? Transforming 1/72 kits? 

I would imagine there's also a bit of "you'd need to design the airframe around the weapon" involved as well. In real life, conformal carriage of missiles has hung on for quite some time, with even some of the new Asian indigenous 5-th gen fighters sporting  conformal missiles rather than internal bays in the public concept art, but real fighter aircraft have relatively large flat undersurfaces which don't have to break apart in order to transform into a robot. There's very few places in the later designs that would allow conformal carriage of missiles because the good surfaces to put them on would separate during transformation.

The VF-4 appears to be an evolutionary dead end, given how few of its major features seem to have carried over to future fighters - no conformal missile carriage, no big built-in beam guns, no apparent re-use of the transformation schema, etc; compared to the Stonewell Belcomm/Shinsei lineage which has kept most of the primary features all the way into the 2060s and mostly added to them rather than discarding features wholesale. 

I kind of wonder whether Kawamori *decided* it was a dead end and abandoned it, or if he was forced to do so because of the constraints imposed by the conformal missile system. 

(one out-of-universe version might be the difficulty  of animation consistency. If you launch an externally carried missile in one shot, it should still be missing in following shots, otherwise you end up with people helpfully pointing out all your animation glitches; magically respawning missiles would be a big obvious. Especially with the low total count that the VF-4 has. You really can't do an Itano Circus more than once per sortie with only twelve externally carried missiles to use, and then you have to remember to animate the fighters as not having any missiles left. With the indeterminate capacity enclosed micro-missile launchers, the animators can be much more carefree.)

9 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

In the Macross Delta TV anime, the Xaos branch on Ragna was depicted as the largest branch and de facto (if not de jure) headquarters of the company's PMC and Entertainment divisions in the globular cluster.  They never mention or allude to the existence of any other ships of the Elysion's type, and when we see Xaos's forces regrouping to retreat from Brisingr it's only a handful of escort warships and the Macross Elysion.

Note that it's the flagship of the Brisingr Cluster division of Xaos, not the flagship of the *entirety* of the Xaos PMC. I'm sort of assuming that the other ships (Megasion and Grasion in Passionate Walkure, and the Gigasion & Co from Zettai Live, are outside reinforcements from Xaos' HQ or neighboring regions. A whole Macross for each inhabited planet does not match what we see in either the show or the movies given that if there was a Macross on planet during the takeovers, we should have seen some of them be taken over on the ground or in space prior to the movie battle where it actually happened.

(We know that Xaos was doing anti-VAR stuff under contract on Planet Pipré in Macross E, but I don't know where that even was - Wikia says it was in the Brisingr Cluster, but the manga scanslation doesn't appear to say any such thing. As you noted, Xaos is HQ'ed on Earth and ought to be pretty much everywhere, so them having a large fleet of ships unfortunately spread out so they missed the first big event, but already moving so they're in time for the second isn't *entirely* silly). 

43 minutes ago, Bolt said:

Was this a captured (at some point) and retooled Zentradi factory satellite?

Yes, to the point where I think they basically re-drew it according to the old line art. 

8 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

* Xaos fielded three Elysion-type capital ships in Macross Delta: Passionate Walkure and eight Elysion-type capital ships against the Battle Astraea in Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!!.  With the Macross Megasion having been sunk by friendly fire from the Var-controlled Macross Grasion in Passionate Walkure and Absolute Live!!!!!! confirming that the Macross Elysion was still too badly damaged to participate in the conflict with Heimdall's forces a year later, that would put the lower bound on the number of Elysion-type warships Xaos possesses in the region at 10 in 2068.  (This assumes the Macross Grasion was one of the seven unnamed Elysion-type ships in Absolute Live!!!!!!.  If not, that bumps the lower bound to 11.

More than that, even. 

This is from when Max gives the order to move into the Alfheim super gate to get to Windermere. All of the large symbols are marked "Macross-class", and there are twelve of them in the readout. Note that since the ship icons go all the way out to the edge of the display this isn't guaranteed to be all of them, indeed the one shot where we have multiple icons for something where we *know* the display isn't cropped is during the conference call during the fleet muster, where eighteen people dressed just like Max, hat and all, are present by video. One of the shots from that scene shows the entire bridge area from the outside so we can count the portraits accurately.. 

This sort of matches the action footage - while the greatest number seen on screen at any one time is eight, there's a few scenes where the camera jumps from "Gigasion with half a dozen ships in the background from one angle" to "Gigasion with half a dozen or so ships in the background from nearly the opposite angle".

In other words, at least twelve, and possibly as many as nineteen of these things were present for the Second Battle of Windermere (movie version), plus the at least two which definitely weren't present due to having been destroyed or damaged in the previous movie. 

Note that the Ragna Branch having to take on Windermere alone in the TV series may be because Xaos was spread out too far or something along those lines - I don't think they work exclusively in the Brisingr cluster and they may have had some travel time involved that made them late to the party... (or more likely, they didn't have the budge to animate them.)

(Note that this is not really the first time where a previously unique ship gains a whole class worth of sisters for the final climactic showdown out of nowhere - there were *plenty* of Quarters shooting at the Vajra queen in Sayonara no Tsubasa, not just the three that we got better pictures of in the magazine articles). 

On 12/27/2022 at 11:17 AM, nightmareB4macross said:

I just believe it to be a preference by Kawamori. The F-14 had a wing sweep that allows perfect stowage of the wings. The F-15 would require more thought process at the time to develop it into something more robust. 

just my two cents.

All of the Starscream toys from the original 1984 one onwards were unarticulated bricks... until 2006, when they actually released two different versions of it with actual elbows and leg articulation. And guess who's name is on the more convincing version?

(Note that Kawamori was involved in the Diaclone designs from which Transformers stem in the 1980s, and is apparently one of the designers that made "Battle Convoy", aka G1 Optimus Prime.)

21 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

The F-14 was not the inspiration for the VF-1.

Really? Either we're talking at complete cross purposes here, or you didn't actually read the book you're claiming to source your info from, or you didn't *look at the aircraft involved*, or some combination of the above. Because that's so blatantly false that posting it undermines your credibility in *general*. 

Yes, the genesis of the VF-1 did not involve the Tomcat at all, but the resdesign that gave it its final form? Someone had a good long look a the Tomcat and liked what they saw, because you don't get *so many* otherwise unique features and combinations of features from a single design into one of your own unless you're literally staring at it while drawing your own thing.

Especially when you end up slapping an iconic Tomcat paint scheme (recently popularized by a movie) on your Tomcat-shaped creation. 

(The thing about the supposed other inspirations is that the Su-27 and MiG-29, the other possible sources for some of the design elements used in the VF-1... weren't seen by westerners other than by spy satellite until 1986.)

13 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

We can rule that out with a fair degree of confidence because we have Kawamori's draft designs going back to early 1980. 

Keep in mind that the whole concept of Macross was changing throughout 1980 and 1981, and that both Kawamori and Miyatake were working on the Diaclone toyline in 1980 (says Wikipedia at least). Originally Macross was supposed to be a silly parody, and then it evolved into a more serious show. 

Also, it turns out that The Final Countdown, rather than having a release delay in Japan as happens sometimes, actually released almost a month earlier over there than it did in the US, on July 5, 1980. 

So I can see Kawamori learning how to do transforming robots working for Takara, starting to work on a transforming fighter for the parody show he's planning with Studio Nue, and then when the concept for the show turned serious, going "this fighter does not look realistic enough for a more serious show, I'll start over and try to make a Diaclone-style robot that looks like a serious fighter instead", and picking the Tomcat as the base because swing wings and twin tails are more easily tucked away during a transformation. And pairing well with the Jolly Rogers tails.  Nothing in that is keeping anyone from re-using the better elements of the old design, like the robot mode components that remained. 

Final design wise, there pretty much aren't any explanations more plausible than "Kawamori saw The Final Countdown", because the Jolly Rogers tails must have come from somewhere and there weren't that many practical places for him to have seen them. Even model kits bearing the Jolly Rogers tails didn't actually start releasing until the late 80s as far as I've been able to tell (courtesy of Hasegawa in 1989 and Heller in 1990 in 1/72 scale, and IIRC later still in 1/48 scale). 

14 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

That second one... the Tomcats and other old aircraft were hauled out of mothballs and upgraded or prevented from being retired and upgraded to make up for the shortfalls in other areas due to losses and the like in the Unification Wars.

The expense must have been utterly ruinous without a pre-existing point of departure from our history though, at least going by what's known now (over what was known when Macross Zero was released). Then again it probably wasn't well known that the US had specifically destroyed critical parts of the tooling for the Tomcats to prevent parts from being exported at the time when Zero was made.

22 hours ago, cheemingwan1234 said:

I know that in real life, the reason for why the VF-1 looks a bit like a F-14 is because Shoji Kawamori used the F-14's empty space between the engines to place the arms for a more aerodynamically convincing fighter mode but in universe, the VF-0 and it's VF-1 descendants are mentioned to inherit the F-14 development group, indicating that the F-14 Tomcat was used as a experimental base that was selected to be developed into the VF-1 Valkyrie. Why select the F-14 over other fighters like the F-15 to develop a variable fighter from?  

 

 

Actually, the real life reason why the VF-1 looks like a Tomcat probably has something to do with the movie "The Final Countdown", which came out in 1980, and starred the Tomcat in the flashiest incarnation of the VF-84 Jolly Rogers paint scheme, which was only used for a few years (on the Tomcat at least, a variation had been used on the Phantom previously), and which had never visited Japan. Unless Kawamori was a collector of what was referred to as "airplane porn" (so called because it was printed by the same people and laid out in the same style as porn mags, only with airplane photos), that's about the only chance he'd have of being exposed to the Jolly Rogers paint scheme given that the squadron lived in the Atlantic and hadn't visited the Pacific since Vietnam. 

Design-wise, the VF-1 is only superficially similar to the Tomcat anyway, what with being much smaller, with smaller engines, and differently shaped *everything*. The only similarities are in their broad outline, and even then the VF-1 doesn't have the gigantic horizontal tails of the Tomcat. Even the VF-0 isn't based on the Tomcat, it's just the VF-1 scaled up because they didn't have the thermonuclear turbines ready and couldn't make conventional turbines with enough power. Once that was decided on they did use Tomcats as testbeds for some tech.

As for why Tomcats were still around in 2008 in the Macrossverse when they were all decommissioned in 2006 in the real world... chalk that up to Kawamori being a fan of the design, I suppose. It is explained that in universe they were upgraded and stuff, but the divergence either has to have been before 1999 (because Tomcat production, and spare part production, had ended in the early 1990s), or production had to have been restarted due to the war (at likely *massive* expense, due to a lot of the production tooling having been deliberately destroyed in the 1990s to prevent new parts from being made and shipped to Iran.)

On 12/7/2022 at 3:59 PM, Urashiman said:

VF-27 would be awesome!

@KOG Water Dragon 

A YF-30 wouldn't be that far off, as they could reuse parts of the VF-31 Kairos. Speaking of which ... A VF-31AX would be possible, as there is only little re-tooling needed.

There's way too many differences between the YF-30 and VF-31 for Hasegawa to be able to re-use pretty much any part of the VF-31, other than *possibly* the "feet". And while I'd have to study the layout of the runners in detail to be sure, I do know that the VF-31AX would require at least a new forward fuselage, canopy, outer wings, and weapons pod, possibly more. Which leaves basically just the legs and the central fuselage/inner wing assembly. 

(Please take a good look at Anymoon.com's comparisons of the YF-30 and the VF-31, while the two have similar layouts, none of the *details* are the same shape). 

Attempting to reuse parts where they really shouldn't have is how Hasegawa ended up screwing up the TV-versions of their 1/4000 SDF-1 - the TV version has a concave undercut on the bottom of the main gun booms that's very prominent, but it's missing on the model because Hasegawa tried to re-use that subassembly from the DYRL version of the kit, and the DYRL version of the SDF-1 didn't have that undercut.

On 12/16/2022 at 1:53 AM, Seto Kaiba said:

Well, now we know they're officially taking the piss.

Amazon.co.jp's listing for Variable Fighter Master File: VF-31AX Kairos Plus has the stat block for the VF-31AX on one of the preview images.  To call it "underwhelming" is excessively generous.  If this weren't on an official listing on Amazon, I'd think I was being trolled.

The specs are barely different from the stock Surya Aerospace VF-31A Kairos.

The wingspan's a bit narrower (13.53m vs. 13.70m), it's a bit flatter but that might be a typo (3.58m vs. 3.85m), the weight is exactly the same at 8,250kg, the ISC rating is the same as the stock VF-31A's at 28.0G, and its engines have the same rated output as the VF-31A's at 1,645kN/ea.  The ONLY noteworthy detail is that engine model changed.  Instead of using the stock FF-3001A engines the VF-31 inherited from the VF-25, the detuned version of the YF-30's FF-3001/FC2 engine the Siegfried custom used, or even a fully tuned FF-3001/FC2 engine, they have a FF-3001/FC3 engine that has the same output as the stock FF-3001A engine the mass production type uses.

This POS really is just a ****ing VF-31A a Fold Wave System and some cosmetic modifications.

I feel so goddamn trolled right now.   That's what I get for daring to have expectations of basic competence for a Macross Delta title.

So the question I'm asking myself is, who wrote these specs? Did whoever used to write them leave the Macross team? Is this another "first printed source cannot be contradicted even when it's an obvious typo" situation?

Screwy official specs is nothing new, you know my views on the ships. 

Or, you know, someone could have looked at the spec progression and gone "this curve is more than a little crazy, let's chill out for a bit."

With regards to the later discussion of which generation the VF-31 belongs to...

Later generation does not and never has implied "better specs across the board". The shift in generations usually comes from applying some critical new technology that lets it compete in a different weight class despite lower specs. 

In the real world "generation" is a marketing buzzword to be sure, but if you look at the definitions you can clearly see that it's not a raw specs issue. I struggle to remember any hard spec in which the F/A-18 Hornet beats out the F-4 Phantom, but the Hornet is still counted as a 4th generation fighter while the Phantom is a 3rd generation one, and I think most air forces would rather have the Hornet than the Phantom if given the option unless they specifically need the longer range, because the Hornet flies easier, has much improved electronics, and is cheaper to operate. 

"Fifth Generation" fighters in the real world are simply those with radical low observability built into their airframes, which means the F-22, the Su-57, the F-35 and that one Chinese thing I don't remember the number of are all "Fifth generation", because they have that one killer tech that lets them dictate when the fight is happening unless they're up against each other.

In Macross, I don't know what the differences between first, second and third generation are, but "fourth generation" fighters were those with independent orbit capability, "fifth generation" are those with Inertial Storage Converters (which means that in terms of generation, the VF-171EX is the same generation as the VF-25 or VF-27; but the standard VF-171 may even be third generation depending on whether it can make orbit on its own). The Master File writers have apparently decided that having a fold quartz boost system is what makes a VF "sixth generation", which make the Siegfried and Kairos Plus "sixth generation" same as the Durandal and the Chronos, while the Kairos is fifth generation like the Messiah and Lucifer, despite not having the improved baseline specs you expect. (Hell, the Kairos is probably a low-end 6th generation fighter as well. It's not boosted *much*, but it is boosted, using fold carbon instead of fold quartz. )

Anyway, the most interesting thing in the previews revealed so far to me was "CV/C-122 Laertius". Always good to have more ship names.

52 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

They also put a round number estimate to the number of VF-11s that were produced during its mass production run.  THIRTY THOUSAND.  That's enough to equip all seven emigrant fleets with New Macross-class ships and leave over 17,000 left.

The VF-11 is deserving of its own Master File book. It has everything: Massive production run; flown by a main character (if only briefly on screen, in a flashback); in service for a long time as the primary fighter; multiple *logical* variants (B, C, D, Thunderseeker; none of this "give it different heads for different characters" stuff); *loads* of pre-existing FAST-pack type additions including an actual Armored pack; and its service introduction is during one of the "gaps" in the Macross timeline (between M3 and Seven). 

Also, consider how many fighters you'd need to defend a planet; and how many of those 30,000 may have been attrition replacements.

46 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Bear in mind, those measurements were taken in 1806-1816 using purely analog equipment so they're not going to align well with modern digital measurements taken two centuries later.  

 

Like I said, obscure... that one fan blog assumed, like you did, that the star didn't exist based on mainstream search engine results and nothing else.

Eden's not in a binary system, so it's definitely not Groombridge 34AB.

Well, finding the thing in modern catalogues is beyond me because the one catalogue that allows you to search by historical information (i.e. I can enter 1810 as a date) requires more info than I have (the hell is an LST?) so I can't figure out what it's called today. 

Immensely frustrating that the astronomical databases have such arcane search interfaces. 

Also.... there are no stars matching Groombridge 1816's apparent magnitude of 6.7 at the distance given from Sol in the OVA (11.7 LY). 

24 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

No, it's not a typo.  It is Groombridge 1816 not 1618.

You won't find much about it on Google or Wikipedia because it is a relatively obscure star, but it is a real star noted/codified on page 53 of Stephen Groombridge's A Catalog of Circumpolar Stars (1838).

It would really help if I had table headings for that so I could see what each column meant and could track it down by its characteristics. 

The only search result on google mentioning 1816 says this:

g Macross Plus, OVA anime television series and compilation film. Groombridge 34 is a possible location of the fictitious "Groombridge 1816" (Helios) system, stated to be 11.7 light years from the Solar System, about the same distance as Groombridge 34 (11.62 ly). Planet Eden, located within the Groombridge 1816 system, is the location of the New Edwards Test Flight Center and its major city, Eden City. The name Groombridge 1816 may be an alteration of the name of the real star Groombridge 1618.