ChronoReverse

While I agree that the OVA version of how Isamu got injured was rather forced there's still one thing about the VF-11 crash that lends it the tininess sliver of "credibility". Basara did a similar crash down a mountain in the Macross 7 movie and didn't come out with a scratch. Of course, he's a freak who doesn't even need to wear a flight suit (and he was in a VF-19) so it's hardly the best evidence.

Huh, YF-19 high speed configuration (was that always there?)? Too bad we don't get to see this mode in animation =) Incidentally, I was rewatching Plus and I noticed that Isamu's YF-19 has a magic gunpod that can reappear for short periods of time after being lost . Poor Isamu though, going up against the X-9 without (much) weapons isn't the best of situations.

Funny how GERWALK is winning when it could've "missed the cut" during the design lol

Hmm, well it's easy enough to make a wiki that only named users who sign in can edit and add content so it shouldn't be a problem.

You know, it's really not that hard to just assume the SV-51 has internal storage for a small amount of oxidizer.

Yeah, I like that your website is not a wiki because I know all the content is put there and reviewed by you. The search engine idea would be icing.

Sweet work! I can't wait to go home and peruse all the transformation details.

If anything is clear about the valkyries in Macross, it's that they're extremely durable and can somehow still transform with damage. Strength-wise they don't seem to have an edge over Zentraedi although the valkyries are also capable of tearing pieces off each other. There's really no explaining it with our modern understanding (where even the slightest misalignment would make such a transformation fail catastrophically) except that Overtechnology somehow allows this. Except where specifically discussing that, there's no point in arguing about that and so it should be taken face value. I feel that with the evidence of the majority of the Macross series, the valkyries have the necessary agility, toughness and the well-defined controls to engage in effective hand to hand combat. However, the limitation is the pilot. In SDFM, most of the pilots were newbies and hence were ineffective. It also doesn't help that most of them don't seem to use the three modes well. Even Shin in Zero had trouble getting the concept that he had to not just think as a fighter jock anymore. The scene with the hand to hand fighting instructor in Zero just emphasizes that the battroids were built for and expected to engage in the sort of close combat a human body would.

Um. Roy first grabs Shin's GERWALK arm and kicks his feet flipping Shin. Shin was flying full tilt in GERWALK mode, the impact was no small thing. Later Roy comes from above, knocks Shin down while wrestling the gun away. Earlier, Nora kicks the arm (and gunpod) right off the VF-0 Shin jumps into using a side kick. During combat with DD, Roy lands in Battroid, kneels, picks up a rock (actually boulder on that scale), tosses it around the corner, and leaps out behind it showing great agility. A freaking destroid leans over the edge of an aircraft carrier to fire the gun over the edge showing the flexibility of even destroids. The same destroid then rolls back into standing position. Nora then delivers a kick that knocks the heavy destroid right over the edge showing her leg has no trouble taking such impacts (even in GERWALK mode). In the fight that ensues afterward between DD and Roy, we get to see things like Roy doing a reverse flip kick and DD doing a flying kick. Of course, in the finale we have Shin finally getting the drop on Nora with a stomp kick. A lot of these moves aren't even possible with an unassisted body because they use the thrusters to enable further air agility. Even the normal moves they pull require training for humans to pull off. You can't say that they were just battroid to battroid and thus the agility is embellished because that's what they did. A flip-kick is a flip-kick. If it were slow then it wouldn't be a threat and would be less than useless. You can't simply make the assertion that a valkyrie, being a machine, is definitely behind flesh-and-blood. There is no proof of that. In fact we have proof that they're at the very least well-matched in the form of Macross Plus. Guld had the advantage of BCS and BDI meaning he COULD control his valkyrie like his own body. Yet Isamu, with standard controls not only matched him in hand-to-hand combat, he had the edge both times during the close ranged stints. Britai isn't a "full-sized Zentraedi". Britai is an enhanced Zentraedi that was far stronger than normal ones. He's the EXCEPTION not the norm. The fact that Hikaru wasn't completely destroyed is already surprising.

Well, if the VF-0 was doing bloody flip kicks already, the system can't be that bad. In any case, there's more indication that it's the pilots being unable to make full use of the battroid than the other way around. If the battroid don't have good enough agility and reflexes then it won't be able to perform those things even if the pilot were better. If Zero didn't exist, I could agree that the system was not as good in SDFM and got better by the time Plus rolled along but Zero clearly shows how well the machines can fight in melee.

I doubt there's much worry about damaging the engines too much with kicks. The OT engines are almost certainly more durable that the conventional engines of the VF-0 and in Zero you get to see Roy manhandle Shin VF-0 to VF-0 during training (see 12:50 Zero episode 2). It's hard on the systems but everything the valkyries do would be tough on them. The real issue is exactly as Zero highlighted it: the pilots of the valkyries simply weren't used to hand-to-hand combat. Hikaru was a stunt pilot. He might be able to pull off fancy flying under pressure but where's he going to pull out martial arts (and I don't mean just the stereotypical Asian fighting styles when I use this term) from? It's should've been a given that Britai, an extremely powerful hth fighter even in Zentraidi terms, would dominate him.

Hmm, the Ohio can carry 24 Tridents which are about 13 meters long and 2 meters in diameter. The calculation to get the absolute minimum volume is then elementary.

Overtechnology takes care of that though. We have lightweight materials that can be as tough as tank armor in the first generation!

Go to your accessories and open up the character map. Highlight the character you want and look at the bottom for the appropriate combo on your system.

6 seems pretty reasonable. The Nimitz class only has 4 catapults and it's not that much smaller than the Quarter.

Not to mention it's much more stable to store valkyries in fighter mode under any sort of gravity.

! That's unbelievably good. Now I really want to make one these...

If only Kawamori would release blueprints for his lego valkyries. I'd love to build a transformable lego VF-25 =D~

Well, if you keep giving replies like this, it will seem like it. I'm really not against the idea of the tokamak; it's quite reasonable even. I was just irked by some of your erroneous assumptions. I saw fit to point out the flaws in the assumptions. Remember the entire thing started when I made a rather innocent comment (I thought anyway) that we shouldn't assume that it's definitely like our tokamak designs or that it should be a tokamak at all. Plus a side comment about nature not having car-sized fusion reactors. Rotary comes from rotation. Even a stick can rotate. You must note that while you were saying hydrogen I didn't disagree. The point is that a thermonuclear bomb isn't anywhere near controlled. As with the example with the gasoline engine, just because you can cause a certain reaction to occur in a small volume doesn't mean you can utilize it at that scale. In the case of fusion, our current efforts for self-sustaining reactions don't quite work at smaller scales with the tokamak design. That isn't to say that OT won't allow that of course. Well, for my first example, I was showing how just because combustion can easily occur in super small scale, doesn't necessarily lead to super small engines. That is to say, even though we've achieve fusion in small spaces, doesn't mean it's physically (as in terms of physics) possible to have a sustained controlled reaction in the same small space. Furthermore, you can't simply discount the support hardware that allows for such reactions to occur. For instance, the tokamak internal volume isn't all that huge but the support hardware plus the generators to reconvert the heat energy into electricity to feed back into the magnetic systems to sustain the fusion reaction as well as keeping it bottled are not things you can just write out. That's definitely a concern (it's neutron bombardment making the metal walls brittle incidentally) but it's actually secondary since that isn't what directly stops the fusion process from self-sustaining. Magnetic fields also can't stop neutrons, them being neutral and all. So far, in tokamak reactors, the magnetic bottle tends to develop "leaks" and there's also trouble keeping the plasma smooth and uniform. The field strength isn't really the issue but rather the control of the fields to keep the leaks away is. Simply applying more power is rather like trying to press a bubble under a piece of plastic; it doesn't help much. If we go along with the analogy, one would have to keep the bubble from getting there in the first place. I had forgotten about MEMS, you got me there (although I did qualify it using gasoline ) With that said... the chamber itself is that small but how much support hardware is required to keep it going? Does it deliver more output energy than it takes simply to hold it steady and deliver fuel to it? Will they eventually be durable enough to be useful? Not every challenge is surmountable. The research will find out of course. Have they gotten past making the parts and testing them assembled yet? A fully functional internal combustion engine at the 1mm scale would be a great achievement. In any case MEMS technology has created many interesting micro-engines and I do not believe anyone has shown that they're physically infeasible. There's even precedent in nature after all for small rotational engines =)

Ah, that's quite interesting. Nonetheless, a more powerful set of engines, even if they're still called the same name, could mean increasing structural strength would be needed.

Which has absolutely nothing to do with a tokamak or thermonuclear. You're going on a tirade because you were simply completely off-base. I think you don't understand the point then. The point is simply that there's limited selection of fusion fuels and hydrogen is the best. It also means that fuel for the fusion component has a very high chance of being hydrogen. Yes, it's called an thermonuclear bomb. Not exactly a reactor We have sustained fusion. The problem is sustained fusion that at least breaks even in terms of energy. Generally, neutrons emissions are a much bigger issue than protons. And it's usually instabilities in the plasma (and it's magnetic bottle) that usually messes things up. Plasma touching the walls doesn't remain plasma for long. And this is why we have gasoline engines the size of a pinhead. After all, combustion can take place in volumes smaller than that. Yeah, that's completely reasonable and I have to agree with that much. With that said, a toroid configuration would likely be the case almost regardless of the type of fusion occurring. Even if (as an example) laser pulse compression style fusion was the only feasibly shrinkable technology availed by Overtechnology, the modules would likely still be arranged in a ring to accommodate the turbine. Furthermore, steady energy output isn't an absolute must either. Back to the car engine example, those don't use constant combustion (like a power plant would) for a myriad of reasons.

Interesting. They did some major tuning to that engine then because the thrust for the VF-22 is also significantly higher.

Considering how fast Alto seems to get back his plane despite the condition he returns them in, a hundred hours to one seems extreme for the average case.

Semantics. It's only residual fusion and besides a white dwarf is planet sized so your original idea that nature has fusion plants that are car sized is still completely off-based. Thermonuclear was coined to describe nuclear fusion bombs because it took a fission bomb (heat and energy) to activate it. There's NOTHING that implies anything about "circularly integrated manner" nor is there any reason to limit it to tokamak designs. Fusion only works with "fuels" below iron in the periodic table. Hydrogen isotopes are the best though in terms of energy released per fusion. No we haven't. We've fused things in the space of a SUV and even smaller but we haven't even got a continuous fusion duration of more than a few minutes and certainly not many seconds for break-even fusion duration. Those tokamak facilities certainly aren't "SUV sized".

Well, I'm not really participating too much in this debate but just offering up clarifying points (I hope anyway) wherever I could. With that said, there's no doubt in my mind that the only limitation for the YF-19/-21, or VF-25/-27 are purely pilot limitations. As for YF-21 and Guld, he was still in full control of the YF-21 so he could not have exceeded the ratings specified in the Compendium. Unfortunately we do not know how much stress was placed on him or how much the dampening systems of the YF-21 can handle. As for the even higher limits of the VF-22, it could simply be because it no longer used the bleeding-edge deforming wing and thus the structural integrity was improved. The more powerful engines could also contribute to increase the durability of the ECA. One thing that is quite noticeable is how the VF-22, despite being deployed after the VF-19S, has significantly lower thrust. This could nicely tie in by supposing more energy has been diverted to the ECA or something.