SebastianP

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

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.

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)

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...)

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).

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.)

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).

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

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).

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.)

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.)

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). 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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

"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.