Macross Models 3D colelction

[PointBlankSniper]

Looks like a simple enough mod for the top one. The second one though, I'm not sure what's going on with the arms or if it even makes sense to have that much articulation on a forklift, with a fist in the way too lmao. But it sure does look awsome. Those forks could have been arm blades or one of those pronged beam guns lol

I always wished Kawamori did more with these. They get so llittle screen time its hard to even tell or remember how they look lol. If he can turn the monster into a transformable plane, I'm sure he can at least turn cheyenne into a tank or apc. He's done valk but with car in his Last Hope Pandora anime before, so that's not even much of a stretch to ask for.

[guyxxed]

The arms are definitely weird on the Delta version. I need to go back and watch the episode clips again to see what each piece is meant to do.  I thought I remembered the hands and forks being opposite ends of a reversible arm (like the Cheyenne does with its guns, and has the hands on its elbows until needed), but that line art makes it look like the hands fold down from the upper arms.  Will see what I can find in the animation. 

I actually always had the opposite feeling on Macross designs:  if Valks can be made so tough when they're dividing the power between flying and holding themselves together, then a destroid with a dedicated power source should be a lot tougher.  Mobility vs sitting duck, I know, but the armor on a Cheyenne should still be an order of magnitude greater than a Valk just because it can afford to throw a lot more power at it.

Transforming tanks would be cool, too, though.  😉

[Seto Kaiba]

On 2/7/2026 at 3:40 PM, guyxxed said:

First pass at a Frontier-style workroid.  Both the Frontier and Delta workroids are just the Cheyenne with various amounts of editing, but I was surprised at how much of a Cheyenne they both are.

Really?  The official writeup of the Destroid Works is very blunt that it's literally just a Cheyenne II that's been stripped of its military hardware and given a coat of hi-viz orange paint.

 

9 hours ago, PointBlankSniper said:

I always wished Kawamori did more with these. They get so llittle screen time its hard to even tell or remember how they look lol. If he can turn the monster into a transformable plane, I'm sure he can at least turn cheyenne into a tank or apc. He's done valk but with car in his Last Hope Pandora anime before, so that's not even much of a stretch to ask for.

The Cheyenne II is a barely-there presence in Macross Frontier and Macross Delta because Destroids in general are pretty useless in a post-First Space War world.

Destroids as a whole were designed around the idea of fighting a land war in a conventional alien invasion scenario.  Something that just does not happen in Macross.  They're land warfare weapons in a space war setting.  Making it transform would defeat the other key attribute of a Destroid... being cheaper than a Valkyrie so that they can be fielded in larger numbers.  Not that a transforming tank would be any less useless in a space war than a regular non-transforming ground-bound robot.  

The main reason the Frontier fleet uses them is because they wanted mobile AA defenses they could deploy inside the dome.  Outside the dome is protected by more cost-effective static beam CIWS and missile phalanx systems. 

 

2 hours ago, guyxxed said:

I actually always had the opposite feeling on Macross designs:  if Valks can be made so tough when they're dividing the power between flying and holding themselves together, then a destroid with a dedicated power source should be a lot tougher.  Mobility vs sitting duck, I know, but the armor on a Cheyenne should still be an order of magnitude greater than a Valk just because it can afford to throw a lot more power at it.

So... that's not quite how it works.  Let me explain.

It's not as simple as just "Destroids don't need to split power so they should be a lot tougher."  You're assuming that all things are equal, and they're not.

Valkyries are aircraft as much as they are giant robots.  Their armor has to be kept thin and lightweight in order to preserve their flight performance and leave room for the internally carried fuel and other vital stores and systems.  As such, they have to rely on more advanced and expensive composite armor reinforced by energy conversion armor driven by their pair of high-output thermonuclear reactors to achieve the required defensive performance.  Those reactors HAVE to be high-output in order to meet the needs of the various other energy-hungry systems on a Valkyrie too, like thrust generation and active stealth, which makes them incredibly expensive.

Destroids are walking AFVs and artillery built for land and surface warfare.  They don't need to fly, and that means they don't need to make the same design compromises that the Valkyries did.  They can achieve the required defensive performance by just having thicker composite armor.  Not needing to provide plasma for thrust production or feed energy-intensive systems like active stealth and energy conversion armor means they can get by with a single, much cheaper and lower-output reactor instead of a pair of expensive high-end thermonuclear reaction turbine engines.  At the end of the day, this makes them much cheaper than a Valkyrie.  The early Destroids were about 1/20th the cost of a VF-1 back before the First Space War.  Of course, this also means they don't have tons of extra power to throw around because their systems are tailored to their needs not the far greater needs of a Valkyrie.

Because Destroids are inherently groundbound in a world where most combat is in the aerospace domain, keeping Destroids as cheap as possible is the only thing keeping them going as a supplement to even less expensive conventional anti-aircraft defenses like beam CIWS guns and missile phalanxes.  

If you were to give a destroid all the same tech as a Valkyrie, you'd have just made a Valkyrie mode-locked in Battroid mode and gotten rid of most of the cost advantage.

Edited 1 hour ago by Seto Kaiba