op4_delta

Macross Compendium is a great site and I have nothing against it, but we should not follow it blindly or try to accomodate our ideas to fit in their descriptions. To me it seems more logical that those purple ringed things are OT reactors and the Asuka has 2 beam cannons, just as it has 2 phalanxes on the bow in "mirror" locations. As for the slow descent of the asuka and the remaining Arleight Burke, it could be explained this way: The birdman-sara did not want to kill any more people, specially the entire mayan island population and her sister on board the carrier.

From my point of view, we should not take all we read in Macross Compendium as 100% true, specially with the Asuka wich entry has a big error in it, the ship´s lenght. It´s entry is also damaged in the Macross Zero official homepage, I wrote the webmaster several weeks ago and no reply yet, so we have to trust our common sense and knowledge of real life and Macross universe weapons and vessels.

Indeed, those may be the ships engines, built with over technology

I agree with Knight26, the 2 barrels may seem different because of a shadow effect, the one on the port side has a shadow over it, besides I don´t see the point of having only one gun that can only fire to that direction. We should revise what the Macross Compendium has, specially the size of the Asuka, with only 250 meters in length it would be about the size of the british Invincible Class VTOL carrier, and lets face it, you cant squeeze 4 catapults and 4 elevator in the Invincible. Another problem is the VLS cell, I deduced it has the same configuration than the Arleight Burke on it´s bow, wich is 4 Mk 41 cells, containing 8 missiles each, for a total of 32 AAW missiles, according to the macross compendium it is located amidships starboard, meaning that is is beside the island, in the OVA is nowhere to be seen, but this may be because of the angles the Asuka is shown.

I really appreciate all the your comments and the warm welcome I got, thanks a lot mates. I made some scree captures to show some features of the Asuka. In this pic both beam guns can be seen, one at each side of the bow. the guns are turreted and have a single cannon. This other pic shows the port side OT gun being destroyed by instructor Ivanov, I though it was Nora. I still wonder why the macross compendiumstates that there is only one OT gun mounted on the Asuka. I will post more about the CVBG when I finish modifying my Arleigh Burke destroyers to the features shown in Macross Zero, like a third phalanx between the foremost chimmey and the bridge. Please keep posting more comments.

When I first saw Macross Zero I fell in love with the design of the Asuka II stealth carrier, I rushed to the internet to seek some info about it but I could not found too much info and only a few images. My objective was to create a 3D model of the Asuka to be used in real time strategy games or flight simulators, and in my quest I discovered a lot about the carrier on my own, enough to dispute the affirmation of it being a small scale carrier only 250 meters long, almost like the french CVN Charles de Gaulle. The Asuka could be taken as a Macross version of the US Navy´s CVNX project, the stealth design is one of it´s main features, it also has a capacity equal or very close to a Nimitz aircraft carrier and almost the same size, 320 meters aprox. Why do I dare to make such assumption?. since I could not find a lineart, I used 2 elements as rference, the catapults and the elevators. The elevators of the Asuka can take 2 fighters at a time, just like the Nimitz, and their layout is almost the same, only 2 elevators have been moved from the place they would occupy on the Nimitz flightdeck. The catapults also cover the same length and are in the same possitions as in a Nimitz carrier. Using the 2 elements mentioned above as reference I began building my Asuka with a Nimitz lineart and a lot of screen captures from the OVA and this are my findings. The Asuka´s flightdeck has less space to park aircraft than a Nimitz carrier, one reason is the large island and it´s silos to house the Cheyenne CIWS destroids the other is that parked aircraft increase the radar echoes, specially if they are not stealthy, like the S-3 vikings and the SeaHawk helicopters. On to the Asuka´s armament. Internet sources describe it with 5 Mk-15B phalanx CIWS, one of them is mounted on the island´s starboard side; 1 beam cannon, I discovered it has 2 beam cannons one on each side of the bow, notably the port beam cannon is destroyed by Nora in episode 3; and last, a VLS cell for anti-aircraft missiles, sea sparrow or SM-2, all those weapons along with the 6 destroids should give the carrier an incredible AAW capability. The most interesting feature in the Asuka is the amphibious bay, it looks like the one on the LHD´s, it has 2 doors, one opening upwards and the other opening downwards, acting as a ramp, is in this bay where the AIFOS is loaded covered by the giant quarentine bubble. That´s all for now, in my next post I will talk about the Carrier Battle Group itself and it´s modified Arleigh Burke destroyers.