Product9

I wonder how they plan to increase the drone performance without actually taking any out. Is that something a firmware update can do?

speed += more;

and call it a day

Brera died in the second movie. He never came out and was never seen again.

That's because the ship he was aboard folded away to parts unknown. Of course he wasn't seen at the end of the movie - he ended up wherever Alto ended up.

It was clearly for the feel of the 'wind', since that is such a big thing for both Hayate and Freyja.

Evidenced by their hair moving, else why animate it?

Do all of the -31s have the drones? The -262 has missiles approximately where the -31's drones come from, so maybe that's an option.

And what does AAAM mean? Anti-Air-to-Air-Missile?

Then, presumably, they will have to be loaded with AAAAMs, and then AAAAAMs, and then.....

Well that sounds like the fewest assumptions to me.

I wonder if they'll verify it at some point.

That's too many extra details that would need to be explained though.

Occam's Razor would lead us to the simplest explanation, that it is likely Macross 1.

Wouldn't Occam's razor lead us to the explanation with the fewest assumptions?

Which is probably the lack of continuity since it's been pretty well established there isn't any...

Not having any canon is kind of frustrating, isn't it? Well, what we lack in Macross canon is made up for by the sheer number of Macross Cannons I guess

Maybe Windermere people would live longer if they stopped trying to surprise kill one another.

So basically certain characters like Michel and Brera won't ever be mentioned or cameo in any future Macross series because each of them died in either the tv series or movie continuities?

Did Brera die? He was aboard the Vajra Frontier when it folded away with Alto.

I know he took an explosion to the face but his -27 was in battroid mode, and he's a cyborg, so...

I did have to do a targeted search to check the gunfire resistance(and I'm pretty sure it is limited to handgun rounds).

You're probably on some watch list now

RTGs use thermocouples to generate electricity. We're on the same page, I think.

Yeah, we are.

Small RTGs are considered safe enough for human implantation(and were designed to withstand gunfire), so I reckon the danger is minimal.

I was only somewhat aware of that. Pretty interesting - I think I'll do some reading.

Babylon 5 had a nod to this with the Starfuries -- the cockpit was at center of mass (more or less)

Oh yeah. I've been meaning to watch that.

Oh, real-world thermocouples are inefficient as heck(less than 10% efficiency). But not slow or dangerous.

Oh, sorry. I meant RTGs, not thermocouples. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

I only meant 'slow' in regards to using something like an RTG to power a jet fighter, where you'd have to have a much faster conversion of copious amounts of energy. I'm not sure even a small sized fission reactor could meet those demands.

And I only meant dangerous in the case of a casing breach, which seems to be the chief concern. Otherwise, why not have RTGs powering our cars? Well, I guess there is cost to consider, but that's no fun.

But that is exactly the same kind of excitation they're talking about. In fact, they're talking about turning the exhaust itself into a lasing medium. But if you add energy to an atom to raise the energy state of its electrons, you also make it hotter, by definition. (Let's just ignore the additional heat generated by these lasers for the moment)

Injecting more heat is very rarely part of an effective cooling solution.

I think I read somewhere that BattleMechs sometimes operate in very hot environments, so in order to effectively bleed heat they sometimes have to heat their coolant to a higher temperature than the outside environment, otherwise the heatsinks would work in reverse.

This doesn't seem like a terribly effective way to manage heat, though, because ultimately you aren't getting rid of anything. Unless you are actually dumping the coolant as thermal mass, which would impose some hefty limits on operation time. I don't know man, BattleTech is a weird mishmash of real world physics and stuff that doesn't make sense. I was sort of hoping you all could shed some light on it.

For the record I'm not a BTech fan, but I do play MechWarrior.

I think you could say the big difference in the plumes in Zero can be attributed to the fact they were using conventional over trimmed (the use of the term "tuned" drives me nuts when I watch Zero) turbine engines in the both the VF-0 and SV-51. Conventional augmentors put out long burner plumes. So long and bright that at night you can see them after takeoff for almost a mile or more. Like Dex said alot of it would have to do with the type of fuel being burned.

The plumes were crazy long in Plus too.

You are correct about that, constant thrusting is not needed in space. The show implies they do it anyway, but artistic license and all that. Realistically, they likely are not always thrusting, and that does make a difference. However having a high acceleration can be beneficial in combat too, which does require thrust. With the inertia store converter, g-forces aren't as much to worry about either probably.

I think DYRL? had the most realistic depiction of spaceflight for the Valkyries. This is a subject I am really, really interested in.

After watching the remake of Battlestar Galactica, I got interested in the Newtonian depiction of spaceflight. I put together a physics simulation in Unity to see how I could program a good spaceflight model, and it was really eye opening. I realized it's impossible to 'turn' in space - you can only rotate and translate. Also, constant acceleration posed problems because in order to change your vector you'd have to accelerate in the opposite direction with the same amount of thrust for the same amount of time to cancel your velocity. This led to me crashing a lot as I couldn't slow down in time to do stuff like diving into a trench like they did in Star Wars. So, I wrote a speed limiter that would cut the engines when a certain velocity was reached, and a flight control system that would cancel rotations and regulate velocities.

I also became aware of another problem with MOST space fighter designs - the cockpit placement. It occurred to me (thanks again to new Battlestar Galactica, which for the record I consider a really bad show with really good space fights) that the further the cockpit is from the center of rotation, the more g-forces the pilot is going to feel when doing fast rotations. If you apply that to something like the YF-19 or VF-31, most of the mass is aft and the cockpit is crazy far forward. Pitching in space would put a lot of g-forces on the pilot, pulling him or her toward the front of the cockpit like one of those spinning carnival rides. Only with the rider facing the opposite direction.

Of course, in modern Macross, they just fly around in space like they do in atmosphere, so nobody cares. But in DYRL? they at least tried.

Whatever, jets are cool.

They're bleeding small amounts off the reaction... probably more to make room for more plasma in the reaction chamber than anything, but "effectively unlimited" is a vague term. If we were to assume an efficiency level close to NASA's projections for hydrogen-boron fusion jet engines, a VF-1 with full tanks (to the Master File's capacity) could fly around the world dozens of times before needing to refuel. I'd call that "effectively unlimited".

I just meant that fuel (as in, propellant) wasn't the chief limitation, as the atmosphere is being used as a propellant. So, as long as the reactor is going, the fighter could fly. Or so I figured. But, flying around the world several times should be as good as unlimited for most purposes

The space probes use the a lump of radioactive material on one side of the thermocouples as a heat source, and a lot of big radiator fins on the other side to keep the outside end cool. The temperature gradient results in electrical output.

The problem we've seen with the Voyagers and Pioneers is neutron radiation from the heat source damages the thermocouples, so power output falls dramatically after a decade or two. Not a problem for a Valkyrie, for multiple reasons.

I like to believe that overtechnology has created a higher-efficiency version of the humble thermocouple, and that is a variable fighter's primary source of electrical power. But this is extremely noncanon.

Don't worry, it isn't a failing on your part. You don't get it because the explanation is , to be blunt, complete nonsense. There are legitimately brilliant ideas which sound like the babbling of a madman to the uninitiated, but this is not one of them.

The writeup is full of the worst kind of technobabble, where they just string words together and hope no one notices the lack of a coherent idea. The basic idea presented appears to be "we heat the hot exhaust gasses up so they're EVEN HOTTER and glow visibly, which somehow results in a net cooling effect because lasers. Also quantum."

The most notably silly part is "convert infrared energy to light", because infrared is a FORM OF LIGHT. Though the idea that by converting it to visible light they can shunt it out of the machine with mirrors is funny too. Light striking a mirror generates heat, and they're talking about megawatts of light.

They should've not explained the how, just described the effect(enhanced cooling, strong visible light emission) and left the mechanism to the audience's imagination.

RTGs, right? I knew of them, but heard they were pretty inefficient and slow (not to mention dangerous). Thermocouples are great and all, but I assumed in Macross they had much more effective ways to convert heat into electricity.

And, yeah, BattleTech has some good ideas, but oftentimes pretty poor execution of those ideas. Regardless of the technobabble, I think it's an interesting concept at least.

Though, could they be talking about excitation in the same way a lasing medium is excited? Heck, I dunno. I'm not a scientician.

I do know that if you add 'Quantum' to the front of anything it makes it work regardless of all other factors, though.

The exhaust plume difference in the later CG valk appearances vs the older cel-animated ones is likely just an artistic choice I bet. I could go into what exhaust plumes should look like given certain fuels used (the plume would probably be mostly transparent actually) but I suspect that is less of a factor than just how it was drawn back then before computers were doing it.

Maybe it's a stylistic thing, but in Zero they had some pretty impressive exhaust plumes and that was CG. The SV-51 accelerating at night in episode 3 comes to mind.

No, you are correct. The air from the atmosphere gets flash heated by combining it with the fusion reaction plasma. What we were talking about was how the engines work in space with no air around to use. Apparently, according to Seto, they just pump up the power output of the fusion reaction to get a similar thrust without the air acting as additional mass flow propellant. I always thought they just used a different propellant to replace the air until Seto told me that, it's pretty cool. It's frankly a nuts idea though in reality... but they aren't hurting for power clearly so why not if you can.

I was still wrong, though, because I thought they merely used the reactor core to heat the air, but that the two were still separate. That plasma from the reactor is mixed with the air (or used as a propellant) is news to me. Wouldn't that mean the flight time in atmosphere would be limited to how much reaction mass a fighter carries (as it apparently would in space, albeit to a lesser degree in atmosphere)?

Speaking of engine exhaust, does anybody else miss the really long exhaust plumes from older Macross shows? In Plus and Zero, fighters had really long cones of flame coming out of their engine nozzles, and it looked really cool. Starting with Frontier, the engine exhaust is super short. What gives?

I thought Impulse engines from Star Trek were nuclear pulse detonation engines.

I also thought Valkyrie engines used the reactor core to super heat a gas and shoot it out the nozzles to make thrust, which is what gives them their effectively unlimited range in an atmosphere.

I think a lot of things, but I don't have any proof of either of these things on hand.

Oh please.. it's a discussion topic. I could ignore every statement too, but I like to think we are here to talk about stuff. I only add in a lot of details in case that helps anyone following that doesn't know that stuff already but hasn't asked. I like to share knowledge. I also like being corrected if I am wrong, or learning new things as well. I'm not trying to tell you that you are wrong or not smart, just putting all I know on the table and letting the natural flow of the topic sort out the answers from there.

If no offense was meant, then I will take none. Apologies for making it an issue: I'm a bit of a soft one.

Now back on topic: The traditional method would be to use it to heat some kind of fluid and use expansion as a means to move a turbine, but the Valkyries have very little internal space to devote to such a system (especially when you consider they have to carry fuel someplace). I always assumed they had a very convenient way of converting thermal energy directly into electrical energy. I mean, if they can create and regulate gravity, then it should be easy.

Which raises another question: if they can manipulate gravity why do they still use jets? Ah who cares, I like jets.

As for the heat-into-light idea, that isn't my own. I stole it from BattleTech, and I may have somewhat misunderstood how it works. I still don't fully get it.

http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Laser_Heat_Sink

Much like energy, knowledge can be nether created nor destroyed, just moved around.

Kind of a fallacy to say that. Technically we convert one form of energy into others all the time. Engines convert heat energy into mechanical energy to drive vehicles. Our bodies convert stored energy in food in the form of calories into nutrients and vital resources we need to function. Plants convert light into food energy similarly. A power plant converts energy on many levels: heat from coal/oil/gas burning, nuclear energy, geothermal, etc into mechanical energy which is then converted into electrical energy. Hydro and wind power convert pure kinetic energy of water and air respectively into electrical.

The difference here though is that in all of these cases, even the ones where heat energy is transformed into other forms of energy, nothing is destroyed. Heat doesn't vanish because it helps move a turbine or run some pistons in a car. Even then there are losses because nothing is perfect, so there is always waste heat that is not dealt with. You can try to re-purpose some of it to up efficiency, but you will never get 100%. Thermodynamics is harsh like that. Yeah there is some handwavium and a lot of unobtanium going around in the world of Macross but nothing that explicitly ignores and violates existing laws of physics. At least, nothing I've seen. Even the more out there things such a fold travel are dealt with using realistic consequences it seems.

Which is why I said easily

Sorry, I was editing my post when you made your last post. I feel like you're talking down to me, though.

Forgive me for not making a terribly long, nuanced reply from my phone.

Just because we can't easily covert one form of energy into another doesn't mean they can't. I know that heat gets radiated away as infrared light, but that isn't to say that when something is hot it's just full of infrared light waiting to escape. I know you were simplifying, but that's may be going too far. I was of course referring to visible light (and other spectra). Although, converting it directly into infrared light and radiating it via a laser or some such would also work more quickly than just natural radiation.

But this also begs the question, which I'm sure you guys have readily available: how do they convert heat from their fusion process into usable energy in the first place?

Hey, why not convert waste heat into something else, say light? Then you can lose it by glowing, like the Valks in Frontier do for an otherwise inexplicable reason.

It would be the opposite of a stealth system, though...

She recognizes Roid since he's the chancellor of Winderemere. This is like recognizing Joe Biden since he's the Vice President of the USA.

Well, now somebody has to photoshop Joe Biden making the declaration of war in Roid's place.

Everybody else was extra careful to not eat any pineapple based products at least a week before the live.

Things outlawed by 2067:

AIs

Concerts

Pineapples

I love everything about Macross to bits but I cant for the life of me see how anybody can hear anything in the Macross universe with these nuclear powered jet turbines buzzing around in the background. And when Hayate was dancing above the crowd he mustve blown some people away, literally, with his jet wash.

Hey, look everybody, it's the "Immelman Dance"!

MILLIONS ARE DEAD

The biggest mytery I'd like addressed is how the heck are Valkyries so quiet?

My point is the glowey knife is less cool than what they already had.

Also, yeah, Alto did use the rearward firing lasers a few times, but come to think of it they act more like machineguns than lasers. I can't remember exactly what they are supposed to be, though.