SebastianP
-
Posts
343 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Events
Gallery
Everything posted by SebastianP
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.)
-
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.
-
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.
-
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).
-
Actually...
CD7620AF.mkv_snapshot_01_34_05_046.png.b451d26e65d5d667c340b525654ad456.png)
-
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.
-
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...
-
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.
- 7133 replies
-
- 1
-
-
- newbie
- short questions
- (and 22 more)
-
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!
- 7133 replies
-
- 1
-
-
- newbie
- short questions
- (and 22 more)
-
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?
-
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.
-
Super Macross Mecha Fun Time Discussion Thread!
SebastianP replied to Valkyrie Driver's topic in Movies and TV Series
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?" 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. -
Super Macross Mecha Fun Time Discussion Thread!
SebastianP replied to Valkyrie Driver's topic in Movies and TV Series
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.
-
Super Macross Mecha Fun Time Discussion Thread!
SebastianP replied to Valkyrie Driver's topic in Movies and TV Series
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. 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.... Some deep-seated taboo about not destroying planets, maybe? Either that or the "we'll retrieve them when the situation allows" explanation. -
Super Macross Mecha Fun Time Discussion Thread!
SebastianP replied to Valkyrie Driver's topic in Movies and TV Series
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.
-
Super Macross Mecha Fun Time Discussion Thread!
SebastianP replied to Valkyrie Driver's topic in Movies and TV Series
Edit: I suppose I should spoiler this even if the game is 10 years old.. -
Super Macross Mecha Fun Time Discussion Thread!
SebastianP replied to Valkyrie Driver's topic in Movies and TV Series
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... 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". 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...) 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... -
Super Macross Mecha Fun Time Discussion Thread!
SebastianP replied to Valkyrie Driver's topic in Movies and TV Series
I think it has more to do with those designs being from the 2020s and we haven't seen anything from that era since M3... where those two fighters were introduced in their canon forms in the first place. In universe the VF-9 is 46 years old (introduced in 2021), and the VF-14 is 37 (introduced in 2030) - they're ancient, and unlike the VF-1 which has a cult following both in and out of universe for being "the fighter that won Space War 1" the VF-9 and VF-14 don't have anything going for them that'd make people keep updating them for four decades. The one place where we could have gotten the VF-4, VF-9, VF-5000 and VF-14 in "modern" Macross was Macross 30, where having more variety of VFs would have fit the existing game and smoothened over the bump between the VF-1 and VF-11, but really all of the VFs that were in the game were flown on screen by either the guest characters in their respective anime, or by the game's original cast, with the exception of the VF-0S (which is just a simple variant), the VB-6 (which Ranka rides to battle at least once, even if she doesn't fly it), and maybe the crank-winged VF-19s (and I'm not sure Gamlin or Milia doesn't fly those at one point in 7). The only ones that are *missing*, as in "flown by a character appearing in the game, in a tv-series or movie" are the VF-17, the VF-11MAXL, and VF-19P, I think. (I'm actually playing the game right now and working on filling out the tech tree. I need more engine parts, and the time trials suck rocks.) What *really* gets short shrift are the various nifty background designs someone must have designed and paid attention to, but which are never named or given any information about. Like every capital ship type introduced since Macross 7 that wasn't some form of Macross-class, including the ones from the games. In addition to Dulfim, Deneb, and the "stealth cruiser" from Frontier, there's another two or three classes introduced in Delta that we know absolutely nothing about other than "they're sold by Epsilon and appear related to the Dulfim and Deneb types", and then there's the smaller stuff, like this thing: (Source: Macross Frontier, Episode 5 - this is the messenger that alerts Frontier that Galaxy is under attack and needs help. It looks fighter sized, with that fold booster on top and what looks like a canopy, but the two second sequence where it folds out and rotates around its axis is the only place where it ever appears AFAIK...)
-
The VF-1D did have a full tandem cockpit and a fat spine, and did have fins that folded... but I think the problem is that the tail can't fold down enough to accept the super parts while still looking decent unless you don't fold the fins. I can imagine this being caught when someone was playing around with kitbashing the 80s Takatoku toys to verify that the configurations designed for the movie worked, and then not being able o make the super parts look good on a twin seater unless the fins were unfolded. Notably, the spines are not the same on the VF-1D and VT-1, because entire sprue where the forward fuselage and top of the center fuselage is a different one in each kit (the VT-1/VE-1 kit also contains the wings, and does *not* contain a new bottom for the center fuselage. The scans at 1999.co.uk aren't good enough quality to figure out what the differences actually are on the parts though, except for the extra antenna blisters on the wingtips for the VT-1/VE-1. Basically, all the largest parts of the two kits are different. except the halves of the lower legs. (Edit: and on the Hasegawa kits, don't think you can put the VF-1 super parts on the VE-1/VT-1 anyway because the connectors are oriented differently as it *still* doesn't fold down the same amount. I'd have to check the actual kits which I don't own at present to verify though).