SebastianP

On 11/27/2022 at 8:51 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

I can imagine that Macross's creators would want to avoid reaching for that particular low-hanging fruit, and instead went for creating a fictional exoplanet orbiting a real but rather obscure star Groombridge 1816.  I'm not sure why they picked that particular star, I'd have to reach out to an actual astronomer to figure out if there were anything special about it.

I couldn't find a Groombridge 1816, so I'm presuming you (or someone else) typoed Groombridge 1618, which is *very* interesting.

Groombridge 1618 has been suspected of having a planet with a 122.5 day year since 1989, and the orbital period puts the planet (if it exists) right in the middle of the star's habitable zone. That the planet would have a mass about four times that of Jupiter is a later discovery. Some of the astronomers working on it have said that it sits in one of the sweet spots for possible evolved life, though that was kind of recently (2019). It's also close to earth relatively speaking (15.88 lightyears), and of course it's *not* any of the stars making up Alpha Centauri or any of the other overused "first colony" stars.

Not that there's anything wrong with using those, because they are spectacularly interesting given that Rigil Kentaurus (Alpha Centauri A) is the same spectral class as Sol, and Proxima Centauri has a confirmed earth-sized planet in its habitable zone.... but since Proxima Centaruri is tiny, the orbital period of the planet is 11.5 days. 

12 hours ago, cheemingwan1234 said:

Actually, the A-6 Intruder and it's variants use it as well together with the A-10

Then again, I wonder how much dummies the UN Spacy went through before deciding on the most suitable way to eject people out of VFs in all modes.

 

It's not just the A-6 and the A-10 either. Pretty much every ejection seat-equipped aircraft with a bubble canopy that was designed for low-and-slow flight has a canopy destruct system, including the F-35B. 

In high speed flight, it's usually enough to just lift the canopy front edge up enough to make the wind rip the thing off, but it only works when there's enough airspeed. There were some bad accidents during the 50s and 60s with early supersonic jets where they'd gone into flat spins with not enough airflow over the canopy for it to come off and the pilot was stuck riding the aircraft into the ground. I heard about one particular incident involving the original Draken when I was in the Swedish Air Force where the pilot had kept calm and reported the entire way down knowing that he was going to die because his canopy wouldn't come off. After that, they fitted explosive canopy separators to both the Draken and subsequent Swedish aircraft.

And even *with* explosive separators, it's sometimes not enough - Goose's death in Top Gun was based on a real incident, and the Tomcat had pyrotechnic canopy removers. If I recall correctly, the NACES seats used on the F-14D and the Super Hornet were specifically made taller so that even if you did smash into the canopy it would be the seat taking the hit. 

For aircraft specifically intended to operate very low and very slow, where there's significant risk that even explosive separators won't provide enough separation in time, they use canopy destruction systems instead and basically blow the thing up before shooting the ejection seat through the hole. 

Considering that the canopy of a jet can be up to a half inch thick, anything that helps remove it as an obstacle or weakens it before you have to ram your head through it is kind of a good idea.

2 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

So, the Nazi's can never be brought up without it being "Godwinned", eh? I suppose their evil makes them sacrosanct from ever being used as an example then?

If motive doesn't matter but simply means, then any surgeon would be considered a murderous psycho because they "cut open living , breathing people". Never mind the intent is to repair structures inside the human body; the means damns them regardless according to that logic!

After your replies here (and the ones in my other topic where you tore apart the permission I got from the Navy for the illustration), I'm afraid that any dialogue with you is just pointless.

"Godwin's law: As an online discussion grows longer (regardless of topic or scope), the probability of a comparison to Nazis or Adolf Hitler approaches 1".

I was just remarking that since you already brought him up, I didn't have to restrain myself because the damage was done. I'm *not* trying to invoke any of the corollaries (such as the "someone mentioned the H word, thread over" that we used to have on USENET), but we're running close to invoking one of the others (any discussion in which Godwin's law is invoked will devolve into either discussion about Godwin's law itself, or whether the comparison to Hitler was valid). 

Anyway, there's a difference of scope, and consequences of actions. And the range of possible intents that would justify the action.

Cutting someone open *can* be justified, it's potentially a lifesaving procedure after all.

Murdering every member of a culture? You'll find that much, much harder to find a justification for without going full fantasy "they breed sapients as cattle to eat their babies as a delicacy" - which is in itself a form of genocide. 

29 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Nobody did.  Believe me, the history of medicine is quite unpleasant enough without getting into that particular pit of insanity.  

Macross's creators have been pretty damned clear about the fundamentally optimistic nature of the series from its inception.  The antagonists in any given Macross storyline are not evil.  They might be misguided, desperate, afraid, or even unaware of the harm they're causing.  None of them are card-carrying villains out to dominate others or destroy things for no reason or because it makes their balls feel big like Stefan Amaris, Gihren Zabi, Sheev Palpatine, etc.  That precondition of malice just isn't there in Macross.

Pengbuzz brought up the German dictator first, hence my saying the thread was Godwinned already. 

And the antagonists in Macross can certainly be evil - not on a per faction level, but certainly on the individual level. And a traumatic backstory *does not excuse* attempted genocide, or else the Failed Austrian Painter would be excused due what he witnessed in WW1. We don't excuse him. We don't excuse any of the historical despots who engaged in similar behavior, or ordered it to happen. Some actions are evil in themselves and no motive can excuse them - torture, slavery and genocide being among the ones we've basically agreed on as a species. Oh, and IIRC non-consensual non-lifesaving medical procedures is on that list somewhere... like forcibly or stealthily installed mind control implants (though the definition is originally meant to cover things like forcible sterilization or mutilations). 

That there are no designated "always chaotic evil" factions, or that there are no "stupid evil" or "evil for evil's sake" villains doesn't mean there aren't outright evil villains in the setting - they're typically the ones that end up killed by the protagonists instead of Defeat-is-Friendshipped or "heroic sacrificed". Leon Mishima from Frontier TV was evil because he was willing to have his president murdered (and in the novels, his VP too) so he could be the leader of Frontier in their glorious conquest of the Vajra homeworld and be "King Macross" like he'd dreamed of since he was a kid in the slums. The Galaxy Cabal from the Frontier movies were evil because they were treating human beings as parts in their machine - quite literally discussing harvesting organs from Ranka to stick in Sheryl before deciding to just take control of Ranka instead and discard Sheryl. Ushio Todo is evil because he's only interested in his own selfish goal, where his revised timeline ends up with him getting everything he ever wanted and a HFY future afterwards, and frakk everyone who got deleted because they'll never be born in his new timeline - including all his henchpeople, since it wasn't clear that he actually *had* any protection from getting them paradoxed out of existence or if he was spinning a yarn to make his pawns go along.

That Mishima and Todo have traumas does not excuse them - they're still rational sane individuals who are accountable for their actions. 

On 11/19/2022 at 11:23 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

Only actually true for the Macross Galaxy side... and that was limited to the soldiers in their corporate army in a last ditch effort to protect the Vajra Queen, on which their entire plan to save humanity from being destroyed by its internal conflicts hinged.  It was not done out of malice, but out of necessity.  There is some other stuff they did along the way (e.g. in Wired Warrior) that is questionable in terms of medical ethics... but at least theoretically non-evil given that it was done to avoid risking the lives of living people.

Havamal used Sharon Apple's unique flavor of manipulation, which is more making people incredibly chill with mild hypnosis.  Not exactly "I have no mouth and I must scream" territory, but also done in order to defend their plan to alter history and retroactively save the entire population of Earth and its many cultures.  Pretty understandable, especially considering the plan was motivated by the trauma and survivor's guilt of its ringleaders not any kind of actual malice.

Since the thread was already Godwinned by someone - the Nazis goals were noble and their means justified in their own heads as well. Everyone else disagreed, all their leaders which were still alive to be captured and tried were hung for it, and both post-war power blocks rubbed their entire nation's noses in it for several decades afterwards. We literally invented the concept of "crimes against humanity" to cover their *means*, as opposed to their motives or their ends. "Do not instigate genocide or you will be hung."

Galaxy wants to turn everyone in to drones for the collective, with them on top. That is very clear from their own statements in the movie. Some of the voices in the brain collective are positively gleeful that soon it will be them on top. Setting aside all the murdering they went through in order to put themselves at the top, what they'd be doing is forcible brainwashing and deletion of culture because everyone will join them or die. Brera couldn't hang a computer full of cyberbrains so he blew them up instead, and Alto didn't have anything else on hand except a sniper rifle that's a memento of someone who was turned into a corpse to be stepped over for Galaxy's ambitions, but I'll take those. 

Todo wants to undo an *unsuccessful* genocide (the cultures survived - not intact, but not unrecognizable) - by performing a *total* genoicide (by erasing history the cultures that developed in the mean time would cease to have ever been without a trace), and he's duping most of his underlings into going along by playing it up as if they'd still *exist* after he was done rewriting a history in which they were never born in the first place. His trauma does not excuse his attempt to murder *billions*. Do not commit genocide. It cannot be justified. Ever.

And he does indeed use "I must scream" type remote control, specifically on Aisha, who is still awake and aware and pleading for help while fighting her own limbs as she shoots Leon and clobbers Mina over the head and carries her off, at least in the game version. And he'd have to engage in even more mind control to put himself in as leader of Earth so he can enact his dream of making Humanity the top dogs in the Galaxy and subjugating the Zentraedi. 

1 hour ago, pengbuzz said:

No true villains here then; that being the case, it's a shame that under the right circumstances, they couldn't just sit down and talk.

The lesson I see in all of this: maybe there was never a good reason for war to begin with.

I disagree with Seto Kaiba's description of the motives of some of these factions as in any way noble, because there's some monstrous "means" being justified by those "noble" ends. 

Like the "I have no mouth and I must scream" remote control used by Macross Galaxy and by Havamal where the victims were basically looking on in horror as their bodies did things they didn't agree with (see Brera's *immediate* turnaround the moment the control implant broke, both in the show and the movies, especially the movie version which immediately went straight for the Galaxy brains to terminate them with extreme prejudice even if it cost him his life because he was that violated).

Or the human experimentation and that they even discussed implanting parts of Ranka in to Sheryl to keep her useful before deciding to discard her and use Ranka as is instead.

There was a *reason* why no one exactly batted an eye at all of Galaxy's leadership biting the dust in the movie; or that executing Grace in the TV series was considered a righteous move (since in the TV series she was portrayed as one of the masterminds, rather than a puppet of the cyber hivemind).

There is a *reason* why no one disagrees Bodole Zer had to be put down.

There is a *reason* why Keith decided to sacrifice himself to take out Roid. And why Windermere doesn't get more in-universe heat after the instigators of this whole thing are all dead.

It's not your ends that decide if you're a monster. It's your means.

I feel like Macross teaches us that most people would not choose war if they had a choice, and it's the people who take that choice away from others who are the monsters. 

2 minutes ago, pengbuzz said:

I wonder if a similar device could do the same for infrared signatures (heat) that would give away a stealth fighter?

(makes notes for VF-113)

Given that stealth in space is impossible without such a device, but several of the VFs from the 2040s era were explicitly stealth fighters anyway? They either must have already had it back then, or there's such a massive continuity hole all of Macross just got swallowed up. So even if there's no explicit mention, the show doesn't work unless the thing exists.

Also, active stealth is supposedly good enough by the fifth generation that designing according to passive stealth rules is unnecessary. (Read: Kawamori was bored with trying to make VFs that conformed to stealth rules and hand-waved it.)

16 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

As we've already done solo jpop idols, idol groups, and more than one rock band if you count the manga side stories, I think the next logical port of call is probably metal.

Japan's got its own local flavor of metal (Kawaiicore) and a few past anime titles like Detroit Metal City have explored metal as a musical genre.  That said, it'd really depend on what the balance of action vs. music was going to be.  Kawaiicore metal would be better for a more music-focused series, where I'd say something like power metal would work better for more of an action focus.  

If you were willing to let the music take a back seat or do another virtuoid idol, you could go with something more action-friendly like eurobeat.  

Swing might work too, if it were really uptempo.

There was a time I would have said jazz, but Mobile Suit Gundam Thunderbolt was so incredibly pretentious about it that it ruined the idea for me forever.

An idea that probably wouldn't work that I'd love to see attempted anyway would be someone doing a series or side story with musical comedy... a space-future version of Weird Al, Tom Lehrer, or Spike Jones.  

Kawaiicore sounds like it's the name for the genre that Babymetal belongs to.

What if the Hoary Froating Head turns his trollface to MAX and goes "boy band and all-female fighter squadron?" He said somewhere that one of the reasons they haven't done another male vocalist is that anyone they picked would have to compete with Basara's towering reputation which wouldn't be fair to either of them, 

Also, another absolute troll idea: Straight up Disney-style musical, complete with character songs for everyone. 

Seriously though, I want to see some more random expressions of culture that aren't the focus of an entire show. Opera, Choral, Musical, Classical music (can you make fold waves with only a musical instrument if you put Fold Quartz into it?), a flash mob concert, Zentraedi trying to create something that is theirs, other forms of *art* in general (I loved that Alto was part of a Kabuki family, though it was a bit aggressively Japanese... hence why I'd like to see classical opera surviving in the Macross-verse). 

OK, so a short question:

What kinds of music would you like to see represented in Macross that we haven't seen yet? I know Kawamori tries to change things up some, but Big West has to be able to sell the music so the main part of it can't be too out there, but I figure there are plenty of stuff that could work as one offs for an episode.

So here are my ideas:

1. An actual space opera, Complete with a soprano singing in Italian. (Brought to you by one too many listenings to Libera Me From Hell from the Gurren Lagann soundtrack...)

2. The Full Size Zentraedi Army Choir singing glorious battle hymns.  (Brought to you by one too many listenings to "Battle Hymn of the Republic" performed by various choirs.)

3. A Babymetal band. (This one might actually work as a centerpiece for a whole show...)

4. All the idols are down with the flu, and the colony is under attack. It's up to a plucky high school Karaoke club to step up to the plate. What they lack in training and raw skill, they'll make up for in enthusiasm, or die trying! No flashy holo-costumes or stage animations, just five girls and a boom box sharing a microphone. Bonus points if it *doesn't* end in them being recruited as professional singers right off the bat.

2 hours ago, wm cheng said:

Sorry, I meant Macross Delta that I just watched, just weird gratuitous nudity and needless emphasis on bouncing bosoms.  Then I watched that video and see very young girls singing and dancing (without the nudity) and made the connection - I didn't realize it was something else.  Sorry I will probably take my old man complaints elsewhere, just disappointing is all and the YouTube video brought it all back.  Thanks for the Macross7 synopsis though, I never got into that series, but your analysis is quite helpful for me to understand in broad strokes - I don't think I would care to get into the minutae.

Gratuitous nudity? I can barely even remember what you're talking about here, except maybe a scene where the girls are relaxing in a Sauna together? I'll see you that and raise you the Minmei Shower Scene from the original TV series... or the improved Mk2 version from DYRL. There's no girl in Macross we see more of than Minmei, IIRC... The bouncing boobs girl is Makina - and that's her thing, she loves showing off what nature blessed her with and the reactions she gets from them. Especially the other girls. 

Also, the format of "artist on holographic scene doing concert number alternating with VF battle scenes" has been a staple since DYRL, and they've been doing it without cutting the music since Frontier. (In Macross Seven, the first performance by the band Fire Bomber is basically cut to shreds because they kept cutting back and forth between a song in progress the concert and the battle in space outside the colony. One of the many complaints about Seven is that despite there being four or five songs at the concert that we hear bits of, the only song they played in its entirety for the next several episodes is the one Basara belts out in the middle of the battle after he barges in with the Fire Valkyrie), and then tries again and again after that.)

It's just that now the technology to animate dance numbers like this has finally gotten to a point where they can use it in anime and they love showing it off... and for the first time since the original series, Ichiro Itano wasn't involved in animating the battle scenes and the people who took over weren't anywhere near his skill. 

10 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

The film's liner notes confirm that the Macross Elysion is immobilized by the damage it sustained in the previous film, so that's probably not the Elysion.

They probably reused the Macross Elysion CG model for one (or more) of the other ships of the same class in the background, expecting it would be too indistinct for the audience to notice.  The same way fans were probably not supposed to notice the Battle Astraea appears to be a modification of the Battle Galaxy CG model that didn't change its hull number or any number of other subtle reuses of CG models and textures for same like that poor VF-0A pilot Tim Baker who gets killed three or four times in Macross Zero.

Yeah, reuse is a definite thing. It was to the point where they didn't bother even putting a number on the 3D Uraga model and just wrote "NUNS" on the bow flight deck so they didn't have to bother... (and then there's the scene in the first Frontier movie where they're panning through the fleet tactical display and the same Northampton shows up in at least three different places, unless it basically teleported to get from where it was last seen to where it's seen next.)

Macross movies are *probably* not supposed to be enjoyed in the format of frame by frame analysis, but how *else* am I going to find out how many gun turrets they stuck on the ships? Especially since they don't bother even describing the ships in the side materials anymore.

The weird part to me is how they literally appear to have gone "oops, we forgot to put flight deck numbers on the Gigasion" when they got to the scene where it shoots the main gun.

Also, one of these days I'm hoping we get a *non* homogenous fleet of Macross-type vessels, where there's multiple different types of Macross ships on screen. Having nine Macross ships show up for the battle and they're *all* Elysion-types? Or the multiple Quarters Sayonara no Tsubasa? Laaaaaazy. They could have added some Quarters to the Xaos fleet IMO, or some older Macross types to the SMS fleet.

(and if anyone ever drops a licensed book with *believable* information for *all* the ships shown in 3D macross - as in, not completely at odds with the what's actually shown on screen - I'll be all over it). 

On 11/7/2022 at 6:03 AM, Seto Kaiba said:

Ernest Johnson was written out of Absolute Live!!!!!! because his voice actor Unshou Ishizuka passed away back in August 2018, about six months after Passionate Walkure came out.

The in-universe reason for his absence - and that of his ship - is that Xaos is still repairing the battle damage the Macross Elysion sustained 13 months earlier during the events of the previous movie's climax.  As a result, [...]

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[...] when Heimdall attacks and occupies Windermere IV in October 2068 it's Max's Macross Gigasion that becomes the new Xaos flagship by dint of having rescued both Walkure and Delta Flight.

Ernest Johnson likely spent the entirety of the second movie's events grumbling miserably on the bridge of the Elysion because the ship wasn't combat-worthy and his ship's relatively meager fighter complement had gone to Windermere IV.

 

Actually... 

On 9/28/2022 at 3:54 AM, cheemingwan1234 said:

I have a feeling that the Clans from BattleTech would make for better antagonists for Macross than the current Macross rogues lineup because they are humanity (and for a Macross cross, they would incorporate the children of the Protoculture such as the Windermerans into their group as well) that due to interstellar distances, lack of resources on their home worlds and isolation managed to evolve into a culture completely alien from their progenitors, making them a fresh take on the human-like aliens in fiction that Macross is fond of.

This would also play into the culture theme that Macross has as the Clans are biologically human (or Zolan, Zentraedi, etc in this cross ) but due to the cultural drift involved in interstellar colonization and slowness in travel due to the length needed to prepare for fold space travel , they evolved a culture that would be considered alien to mainstream culture in the New United Nations government such as the Clans' honor code (zellbringen, bidding down and issuing batchalls.... you get the idea ) being considered a violation of common sense by the rest of the NUNS but evolved due to the relative lack of resources in Clan space.

Moreover, it allows for the original idea of music being a tool of culture that is used to bridge cultural/communication gaps between different groups , more similar to that in Frontier and SDF Macross rather than in 7 or Delta where the music theme is used to handwave things such as Sprita or treating Vars Syndrome. Here, music would be used to bridge the gaps between the cultures of the the New United Nations Government and the Clans but military force still has to be used to stop the Clan Invasion once enough knowledge of how the Clans work is gained from them.

From what I remember of reading Battletech fanfiction, the Clans are mostly a threat because they have technological superiority (especially in military-applicable fields) and believe their culture is the be-all, end-all, and everyone else slots into the bottom of their caste system. Kind of like the Draka but in space. And the technological superiority they do have is because they spent one less century trying to blow each other up to decide who's on top of the heap than the rest of humanity, meaning they *lost* less tech, rather than developed it.

The situation in Macross? They've spent 55 years engaging in absolutely breakneck technological progression, and while not everyone is sharing everything with everyone else, it's been a concerted effort with only minor disagreements on the whole, because everyone is acutely aware of the scale of the threat that surrounds the humans and their allies - namely, that there are thousands of fleets identical to the one that slagged Earth out there, and any one of them could decide humanity is too big a threat and try to finish the job at any moment. There's no way for a breakaway faction to have developed *even faster* in those 55 years to the point where they'd be a large-scale military threat to the forces we see in the shows and movies. 

The only way for Macross to run into something that would be a Clan-like antithesis to themselves is if they somehow get invaded by a Star Trek-like Mirror Universe or something.

Also, the Clans as is? If they dropped into Macross, worlds and all, they'd be missing presumed eradicated due to pissing off the Zentraedi. Because the Zentraedi are just plain better at this whole "warrior race" thing. 

15 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

That's not quite accurate.

Macross never really addressed the topic in any specific terms until 1992-1994.  Macross II: Lovers Again's creators chose to make Macross: Do You Remember Love? the "correct" version of the First Space War and then built their setting and story on top of that.  Then you had Macross Plus and Macross 7 coming along two years later along with the official statement that Macross II: Lovers Again was now a "parallel world" story and that Macross: Do You Remember Love? was really an in-universe historical drama from 2031 that had been filmed with real ships and mecha.  A fair amount of ink was then spent explaining how the various new designs in DYRL? actually fit into the setting.

The point really didn't end up in the spotlight until around 2008 and the launch of Macross Frontier for the 25th anniversary.  There were publications asking Kawamori about how the new series fit with events from works like Macross 7, Macross VF-X2, etc., and also fan questions at events that inquired about things like the status of Macross II.  That was around the time the "everything is a dramatization of a true history" thing really gained traction.

Official statements may not have been made until 2008, but I think the evidence was there to see much earlier. And when the statement *was* made, it made sense in the context of what was already out there, because of the problems fans had fitting things together as it was. 

At any rate, the fandom was more or less prepared to find out what Kawamori's thoughts were on the setting, hence the minimal backlash.

The Star Wars thing was because a huge amount of paying fans had invested a lot of money and a lot of time in the idea that the side materials were a coherent thing, and then had the rug jerked out from under their feet. That the whole Expanded Universe was a colossus built on feet of clay (the ever eroding lore from the older books where any statement that made Star Wars seem powerful was enshrined as gospel but entire sections of the same books were thrown out as inaccurate, to the point where I felt the only thing people even cared about from the Imperial Sourcebook was the definition of Base Delta Zero and that a Star Destroyer could pull that off solo, because it made the numbers big, or that the only statement anyone cares about from the novelization of The Empire Strikes Back is that the Avenger "vaporized" an asteroid, because it made the numbers big. etc.)

The worst thing that ever happened to Star Wars was not the decanonization of the Expanded Universe, it was that Disney allowed the same numbers to be regurgitated again in fresh books after they cleaned the slate. The new movies? They barely even rate...

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Perhaps... but then again, many Macross fans find Kawamori's take frustrating and ask questions like the above about the existence of an objective value of "truth" for the series.

Other franchises have run into outright fan rejection when attempting something similar.  Like when Star Wars's new owners declared the old EU apocryphal or when the Star Trek: Enterprise series ended its run with an episode that was actually a holodeck program, leaving the door open to hint that the entire series had been a holodeck recreation and not a true history.  It's an approach that tends to be found slightly frustrating whenever someone attempts it because people are hardwired to look for patterns.

 

That's the intended approach.  

Though Big West, at least, seems to recognize that fans are often in the market for something a bit more connected and make the effort to join up the dots anyway for the people who care.

Macross gets away with it by never having pretended that there's a single true depiction to be found, or that all the things across all media actually happened to the same characters. DYRL basically throwing the original SDFM story out with the animation set the tone for the entire franchise that way, and because it's *always been that way*, there's no fan backlash because the long-timers like us know and will inform the newcomers what the score is on that front.

Star Wars got backlash for deep-sixing the Expanded Universe because that had been the vast majority of the canon for quite a while - You can watch all the movies in a single day, but it would take a person literal years to go through all the books and comics. They kind of had to do it in order to make more movies in the first place without forcing movie-only fans to read thousands of hours worth of books to catch up and figure out what was going on (plus, by the time the main characters were the age of their actors, crap had *gone down* in the GFFA and Star Wars wasn't really recognizable anymore. Also, *so many things* happened to the main characters that you'd have to wonder when they had time to *sleep*). 

And Star Trek got backlash because the execs, on seeing that a lot of fans were raging against the inconsistencies in their unpopular Star Trek show and viewership were down to the point where the show was being cancelled, decided that "You know what, if the events in the show are this unpopular let's make it ambigous if they never happened in the first place" which enraged a *different* clique of fans.

Kawamori going "There is no canon. Even my own material is not "canon". There's a broad strokes timeline of events and a set of characters who may or may not have been involved in those events, but that's all we're willing to say is factual" (or words to that effect) may be hugely frustrating to Star Wars style fans who need everything to line up, but it's a massive boon to fanfiction writers who can basically say "Kawamori doesn't pay attention to canon so why should *I*, so event X that you're all worrying about didn't go down *either* way shown on screen, it went down *my* way." 

I just wish more fanfiction authors would take advantage in English, because there's really nowhere near the amount of fanfiction available for this setting as it deserves, IMO. 

7 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

We - the viewers - have no real insight into the so-called "real" Macross continuity.  Nobody does, really.

Why?  Because it doesn't actually exist in any sense.

The notion that all Macross works are fictionalized dramatizations of a "true" Macross history is Kawamori's chosen/favorite metaphor for explaining to fans that Macross runs on broad strokes continuity.  "Broad strokes continuity" is, of course, an author's polite way of expressing to his or her audience that "It's my story and I'll do what I want".  The past, in any given Macross series, is whatever Kawamori wants it to be.  He has no qualms about completely changing the significance of events from past Macross works to suit his new story.*  He'll leave stuff out, add new stuff in, some characters get forgotten and others get the "remember this new guy who was definitely with us all along" treatment.

The metaphorical waters are further muddied by the existence of fictionalized dramatizations of past events within the context of individual Macross shows as well (e.g. the 2031 film Do You Remember Love?, the 2045 TV serial Lynn Minmay Story, the 2058 movie Birdhuman) that are all presumably taking their own liberties with history in general terms and specifically to the version of the backstory in that Macross series.**  Characters in-universe have their perceptions of history colored by these fantastic dramatizations of history's events, including Basara Nekki, Mylene Jenius, etc.  

 

Really, the closest you're going to get to an actual yes or no answer is the official series chronology maintained by Big West in official publications like Macross Chronicle.  For that specific purpose, the answer to your question is "No" because that official chronology bases its First Space War history on the Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series and the events of Macross: Do You Remember Love? are an in-universe dramatization that debuted in in-universe theaters in 2031.

 

* As seen with the significance of Macross VF-X2's events changing in Macross Frontier and Macross the Ride and the story of Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!! implying several technologies were banned that demonstrably were not so in previous works.

** For instance, the version of Do You Remember Love? seen in Macross 7 contains scenes not present in the real world film Macross: Do You Remember Love? including Max and Milia's wedding.

So much this. 

Trying to find the "real story" is an exercise in futility because everything is subject to change, even the stuff written currently in the Chronicle can be thrown out if Kawamori decides to write something set earlier in the timeline again, and introduce new mecha in the process. Like what happened with Macross Zero, which conflicted with a bunch of previously established lore and introduced the VF-0, which had to be given *that* particular non-sensical designation for reasons. 

Best answer to whether something is actually true is "does multiple sources agree on it"? 

So, we can say Frontier fought Galaxy and the Vajra in 2059, and landed on the Vajra planet after exhausting their resources, because all the sources agree. Sheryl and Ranka definitely exist, they're referenced as inspirations for the characters in both versions of Delta. The statuses of Sheryl, Alto and Michael? Take your pick, because this is one where the sources definitely disagree...

(Though it feels like Michael has more evidence supporting his survival than not, given that he lives through the movies, that Labyrinth of Time directly follows the movies, and he lives in Macross 30, in which the characters appear to come from a post-Vajra War timeline in which somehow everyone survived and are well. )

So yeah, broad strokes.

An alien starship crashed in 1999. There was a war in the 00s between people who wanted a unified government and people that didn't. The Zentraedi showed up and bombarded earth into a wasteland, and were defeated by the crew of the rebuilt alien starship and the civilians they'd rescued. Hikaru and Misa were heroes of the war, Kakizaki and Focker both existed and both died. Did the SDF really dock with the Daedalus and Prometheus though? We'll never know because the versions don't agree with each other. 

There was an incident involving Sharon Apple and a pair of hot blooded fighter jocks flying prototype machines in the early 2040s. Did it *actually* involve mind-controlling people to the point where they managed to launch the *Macross*? Normally I'd go "what are you smoking" if someone tried to tell me that thing was in any shape to fly after 30 years in a lake being used as an ornament. 

Fire Bomber became very popular in the 2040s. Whether they actually had any of the adventures from Macross 7 in the real timeline, or flew VFs with musical instruments for controls? Your guess is as good as mine.

Galaxy and Frontier both entered Vajra space and go their asses kicked by the Vajra until communications were established in 2059, Galaxy was destroyed in the process. Ranka made a name for herself. Frontier settled on the Vajra home planet. All agreed on in both versions and referenced in later material.

Is Sheryl still sick? No idea. Is Alto missing? No idea. Did Michael die? No idea. Given that official material exists that go both ways *and* there's what appears to be a "golden ending" referenced in Macross 30? Make up your own story. (Hell, aside from Sheryl and Ranka, who are named in Delta, do we even know if there was an Alto or a Michael at all...?)

And the reason all this ambiguity is a *good* thing is because Kawamori is not constrained by having to tell the same story twice, and can surprise us with some pretty choice twists. Like how, because watchers of the Frontier TV series knew that Michael died in it, they were able to fake us out with his apparent death in both movies and still have him alive at the end of it. Likewise the other fate-alterations from the second movie. 

To paraphrase Ramba Ral: These are no compilation movies! No compilation movies!

This week's image is up:

Queadol Magdomilla looks ok, but the Nupetiet Vergnitz variants look way too skinny in the top view  to me, and the less said about the abomination that is the Queadol/Gun Destroyer hybrid the better IMO. (Huh, the artist is aware of the issue with the width of the ships. Doesn't say if it was deliberate, but he knows they're narrower). 

The captions for the two N-V versions say "Large Fleet Command Battleship" and "Large Gunboat" according to Google Lens.

Since both the Q-M and N-V versions were on this sheet, if there are any more Macross illustrations after this they'll be entirely new to me. Possibly an "everything on one chart" size comparion? 

On 11/10/2022 at 3:19 AM, darkranger12 said:

The small command bridge always throws me here.

 

Keep in mind that that "small" command bridge is still two thirds of a square tall, and a square in this drawing is 66 meters. Even taking off the masts, you're looking at something like eight to ten decks tall for that bridge tower.

The Quiltra Queleual is a ginormous behemoth of a ship and adding human-scale features to it really shows that off. 

38 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

And this has what to do with what now?

Also, not a great example since this does actually work in terms of the ship's internal volume and it's well attested-to that the ship itself is mostly hollow... which enabled them to get all those people in there in the first place.  (Not to mention it's also well established that it was a very suboptimal situation and the ship really didn't have the resources to sustain the population it was carrying... and that the mass-production type scaled its population back to around 10,000.)

Mind you, this runs into the problem of the average person's inability to grasp the sheer scale of these ships... or even of our much smaller contemporary supercarriers.  Few people have access to manmade structures large enough to be comparable.  My workplace, for instance, is one such structure.  You could park eight Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carriers in it and have room for three or four more if you parked them in the courtyards.  It's square footage is approximately equal to just the footprint of the Macross (~501,700 square meters), and even with over 15,000 people and several hundred cars in it it's still pretty much empty.

The problem is we see how people live in the city and it's not "stacked like sardines in efficiency apartments." There's just way too much *space* inside the ship. I mean, just look at the training area where Hikaru did his basic training early on in the show? There's an actual military base with a barracks and everythign. That's got to take up a huge chunk of not just deck space, but volume. Same with the park and amphitheater where the Miss Macross competition takes place. Then there's the roads, and the business district, and the fact that the buildings in the city don't go all the way to the top of the compartments they're in, so there's space above that's effectively wasted. 

The size of the features we see inside the ship add up, and the tally doesn't really match...

Which is why I think that the size of the population and the facilities within the ship are holdovers from before they decided "won't it be cool if the Macross punches something with an ocean-going vessel?" 

1 hour ago, Knight26 said:

ANother way to look at it.  Tokyo has a population density of 6000+ people per square kilometer (and it isn't even in the top 100 for population density).  Assuming a rough usable deck print of 1000mx400m, that is .4km^2, per deck.  The SDF-1 is then 312m tall, of which maybe 100m would be full size decks.  Assuming 3m deck spacing average, that gives approximately 33 decks, so a total deck area of 13.2km^2.  Not including the partial length/width decks, that gives space enough for 79,200 people.  Which matches up nicely with the original numbers of 20k crew and 58k civilians.  Even with the lost deck spacing between individual components, there are still additional deck levels to make up the difference.

Your math makes my brain hurt, you can't divide the ship into 3 meter decks and claim you can get the same density per square kilometer of deck space as a city full of skyscrapers gets per geographic area.

Being very generous, the Macross has an overall population density of around 150,000 per square kilometer of surface footprint, and that's counting the space in between each arm and leg. Without that, we're probably looking at 200k. While there are places in the real world with 150k per square kilometer, looking at the wikipedia articles for them I'm *guessing* that has to do with people having twelve kids and living in shoebox deathtraps with streets so narrow that if a fire ever occurred, the fire engines would have to wait outside the district lines because they won't fit.

The first "affluent" area listed on Wikipedia's list of city districts by population density among the ones I checked at least is Yorkville, Manhattan. Where the residents live in 40 story skyscrapers, and have a population density of 60k according to the 2010 census. 

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Considering how ruthlessly the Protoculture economized everything else about the Zentradi's ships and equipment, it seems unlikely they would order such a thing be constructed in Zentradi fleet motherships unless they intended to actually make good use of it.

 

Or, "Zentraedi are soldiers, they don't need comforts. I, however, do, and if I have to go anywhere near a battlefield I want to take a piece of home with me and be as comfortable as possible. And even if I'm not there, I want the ship prepared for my arrival at moment's notice".

Anyway, a quick illustration of why ship sizes in Macross are bonkers unless they're literally bigger on the inside:

The ship model was posted to the Sketchup 3D Warehouse by David M, I've rescaled it to "true scale" so it's 1200 meters long instead of just one. While not perfectly accurate, the proportions are good enough to give the gist of the size.

The block-like things are stacks of civilians, each one in a phonebooth sized box (2 x 1 x 1 meters) spaced half a meter apart, with 15,000 civvies in each stack. (10 tall x 15 deep x 99 wide in each stack). So... given how much sheer volume that just the *people* take up... how does a city fit inside of this ship? (The answer is, "super dimension means bigger on the inside", alternatively "sci fi writers have no sense of scale". 

I get the idea that the official size was arrived at because someone came up with the idea of the Macross Attack being performed with a surface ship to the face, so they needed the ship small enough that the surface ship was not ridiculously huge (it still is, but at least ships in the same general size category are plausible, given Seawise Giant/Knock Nevis was around that length); you can see what's recognizable as the Daedalus in concept art that predate the final shape of the SDF-1 itself.

But the the "50 thousand civilians in a city built in the unused spaces" either predate the size change to accommodate the Macross attack, or no one ever did a visualization like this to see how much sheer space that just the bodies of those 50,000 civvies would take up...

Edit: 

Instead of a phonebooth, this is the amount of space 45,000 people each living in a 2 x 4 meter room take up, without paying attention to things like corridors and plumbing. That's around 5 tatami mats, so not the absolute smallest you can go (3 tatami is the smallest I've found), but it's on the small side definitely.

3 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Now, that was true up to a point... but even if we ignore clearly-armed constructs intended for Protoculture use like the Birdman, Fold Evil, and Sigur Berrentzs, the Protoculture did not have the luxury of leaving their defense exclusively to their clone armies of Zentradi once the Supervision Army emerged.  They had to take a direct hand in their own defense because their Zentradi forces were hamstrung by the directive "Do not interfere with the Protoculture".

How much control did the "operators" of the Birdman and Yurva Arga really have, though? Sigur Berrentz being a flagship for miclone use I can see, but it also feels like it was built way way late in the war, then hid away.

3 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Mind you, there is some evidence to suggest that the Protoculture took a direct role in the operations of their Zentradi forces even before the Supervision Army emerged and began decimating the Protoculture's population.  The Fulbtzs Berrentzs-class motherships are noted to have amenities that are clearly intended for use by Protoculture stationed there, like a 250 square kilometer (61,776 acre) nature park that reproduces the conditions of the Protoculture's homeworld.

This just makes me think "the most overdone political VIP quarters imaginable", where a protoculture representative *could*, if they even bothered to be present, live like at home and only be bothered once in a while where the Bodolza-equivalent gave their reports and received orders. It doesn't really smack me as something you'd find on a ship where the leader was expected to be on the bridge or in a CIC giving orders, or strapped in a mecha and leading from the front. 

A 250 km3 park on a military warship could be excused if it's for the crew's R&R, but the Zentreadi don't seem to know what that even is....

3 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Once the Protodeviln were sealed, there's no obstacle we know about that would have prevented them from simply solving the problem forever by dropping a dimensional bomb on the planet.  Or doing the same to many of the other irresponsible inventions they created. 

Some deep-seated taboo about not destroying planets, maybe? Either that or the "we'll retrieve them when the situation allows" explanation. 

On 11/6/2022 at 2:18 AM, Seto Kaiba said:

After a while, you start to wonder.

The extreme lengths the ancient Protoculture went to in order to seal and bury some of their more irresponsibly dangerous creations on various remote planets starts to feel a bit like wasted effort when you consider how many of them have ultimately proven to be quite vulnerable to "just shoot it".

The problem seems to be that the Protoculture decided that "shooting things" was something that they could leave to purpose-designed servants, so that they themselves could concentrate on more civilized pursuits like singing and science and developing creepy superweapons. Then the superweapons were possessed, killed off the designers, and co-opted the slave soldiers, which left the singers and non-superweapon scientists to figure out what to do about it... and they went with "sing and science the problem away for now" because that's what they had on hand. 

Macross Earthling culture doesn't segregate warriors, singers and geniuses, they all do battle together, with the singers protecting the others from mental influence, the geniuses figuring out where to apply the shooting and the warriors applying the shooting. And it's not like people who are multi-talented has to choose one or the other either, as you can be both genius and singer, or genius and warrior, or warrior and singer. Or all three.

That's why they're *able* to apply "just shoot it" as a solution to a problem which basically went "yoink" when the Protoculture sent in their purpose-designed warriors.

The new one is up, we got the Quiltra Queleual variants today. 

Basic green Zentraedi version from the TV show (with added turrets that weren't marked in the animated version); Unified Forces version with all the turrets replaced by their human equivalents and a bridge added on top; and the colony ship version. 

Two Zentraedi charts to go that I'm aware of - just the Queadol Magdomilla and the Nupetiet Vergnitz left. It will be very interesting to see if the artist has more to show us after that though, because anything beyond the Zentraedi ships will be entirely new to me. 

8 hours ago, TG Remix said:

I also keep forgetting Macross 30 has a story as well; I just don't think it's as well documented as VF-X2's. Time Travel is involved, iirc?

Edit: I suppose I should spoiler this even if the game is 10 years old.. 

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Eh... we were talking more about official publications, which really don't have as good of a reason to skip over the entire 2nd Generation like that.  Especially when they're talking about the history and development of VFs.

For mainstream fans who haven't read and played *everything*, the VF-9 and VF-14 are non-entities - they each have one appearance in the animation, in the background at New Edwards in PLUS and in a flashback image from Delta. They were in M3, which is a niche side game on a console that went bust; they're in the niche artbooks that only hardcore fans buy; they've got two pages each in Chronicle; and the VF-9E was in Macross: The Ride. But basically, your average anime only fan will go "huh?" if you ask them about either.

I'm guessing the author of the book you got either didn't read Chronicle or isn't as invested in Macross as we are. Given the frankly embarassing booboos you showed (which macross is which, exactly?) I'm thinking this is someone who got paid to do this rather than someone who was actually invested...

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

If I were in a snarky mood there's a Luke Skywalker meme I could deploy here...

Aaaaaaanyway, in a non-snarky manner, you'd be wrong to say so.  The VF-9 may be 46 years old but like other models of Valkyrie such an expensive aircraft is not something you throw away lightly.  General Galaxy was still developing updates and upgrades for it at least into the 2040s based on what we're told in Macross the Ride.  The VF-9E was an effort by General Galaxy in the 2040s to adapt the next-gen thermonuclear reaction burst turbine engine tech developed for 4th Generation Valkyries, albeit with less than ideal results in testing.  The VF-14 is noted to have been developed with longevity and easy upgrades in mind, boasting a roomy design that could accommodate mission-specific hardware and other upgrades beyond its original capabilities.  The Macross Galaxy emigrant fleet was noted to still be using the VF-9 and VF-17 in 2059 alongside the VF-171 in Ukyo Kodachi's novelization of the Macross Frontier series.

For its part, the VF-1 Valkyrie's enduring role has a lot more to do with decommissioned Valkyries being snapped up for use as civilian utility craft making Shinsei Industry realize there was a market for an inexpensive Valkyrie outside of the military than it does the VF-1's service history as a fighter.  Decades of improvement in manufacturing technologies made the VF-1 cheap enough that it was nominally within the reach of private civilian owners.

I don't have access to The Ride as I don't read Japanese, but the problem with all this backstory stuff is that the spec sheets tell an entirely different one, where the VF-9 is so horrendously outperformed in raw kinematics (thrust to weight ratio primarily) that I don't see how you'd ever make it catch up. Just to match the VF-171 for thrust to weight it needs a 50% increase in thrust. And that's a *slow* VF. To match a VF-19S, it needs 4 times the original thrust.  To match a VF-25, it needs almost eight. To match a YF-29, it needs *twelve* times as much thrust. And even the 50% increase would basically eat a normal design margin. 

The difference in performance between the VF-4 and a VF-25 is less "F-4 Phantom vs F-22" and more "P-40 vs F-15". 

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Quite a few others, actually... the big one being the SV-51α, which is not piloted by anyone in-game and has never had a named character pilot in the official setting.  The same is true for the VF-25A.  

Ones that have no pilot in-game include the VF-0S, the stock VF-171, the VF-19A, VF-19F, VF-19S, and VB-6.  The VF-0S was more or less exclusively Roy's ride, the stock VF-171's got several associated pilots but none featured in the game, the VF-19A which is exclusively Aegis Focker's ride (and seems to be in there solely to have a VF-X Ravens paintjob), and both the VF-19F and VF-19S are Emerald Force's signature ride but they're not in the game either.  (That's not counting New Game+ stuff like the Zentradi mecha.)

Though the VF-171 did try to double for the missing VF-17 in its alt paintjobs, which are VF-17 paintjobs from Macross 7.  

(You could say the VF-5000 made it on a technicality, as at least in the novelization the replica VF-0s used on Uroboros contain VF-1 and VF-5000 hardware.)

I'm still not entirely clear on whether they were originally planning to have Roy in the game or not - his rides are all there, and most of his companions, but not the man himself. Maybe it's because he's not directly associated with a songstress.  

Anyway, the VF-171 and VB-6 are probably easiest explained by "we made those for the Frontier games so we already had them ready and tossed them in because why not", the VF-19A is IIRC basically the same model as the YF-19 (at least it is in plastic...); the VF-0S, SV-51Alpha and VF-27Alpha are just headswaps of units already on the include list (and the VF-27Alpha is probably also a re-use from the Frontier games). Which means that the Emerald Force VF-19s were the only full VFs made specifically for the game without having a character in mind for flying them. 

(currently stuck searching for Sierra Stars and Ouroboros Rocks so I can finish up the race track unlocks in the desert. I think I need eight more Sierra Stars...)

3 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

That's different... those are meant to be background designs.  Things that aren't subjected to scrutiny.  Ship stats have always been kind of vague, with most being no more detailed than saying a ship has "many x" of a given type of weapon.  Design-wise, they're what Star Trek producers used to call "Feinbergers" after property master "Irving Feinberg".  They'd just include in the notes that the scene called for a "Feinberger" and let Feinberg figure out what the hell kind of prop needed to be made on his own.

Back in the 80s, the data books that came out explained *everything* that the mecha designers had come up with. The cars, the phone bots, the vendor bots, the ships, etc, with animation notes to explain how the weapons worked and actual stat blocks. 

Same thing happened with Macross 7, the ships were described and named and given lots of line art from the animation notes. 

In the 3D Era? Nothing. We don't even get names for ship classes that aren't obvious updates, and despite 3D models existing we don't even get an official length of the ship or even decent quality pictures of the model...

And when we did get official stats, they didn't match the animation...