Super Macross Mecha Fun Time Discussion Thread!

[Seto Kaiba]

58 minutes ago, SebastianP said:

It stops being an "animation error" when it affects the plot, [...]

No, it's an animation error if it's off-model without an in-story or production explanation.  If it's off model and it has an in-story or explicit production explanation, then it's not an animation error.  (For instance, Max's vertical stabilizer missiles in the original series are an attempt to address an animation error after animators noticed mid-production they drew more missiles being fired than the VF-1 actually carried.)

Whether it affects the plot or not is irrelevant.  Mistakes happen.  

 

58 minutes ago, SebastianP said:

[...] and neither Macross 30 nor Macross 7 episode 44 have plots that work if the ships aren't substantially larger than 250 meters. They just aren't capable of being carriers at that size.

My good fellow, there are real world aircraft carriers in service right now that are the same size or smaller than the Northampton-class.

The Northampton-class stealth frigate is 252.5m long according to its Macross Chronicle Mechanic Sheet.

France's Clemenceau-class aircraft carrier, including the French navy flagship Charles de Gaulle, clocks in at just 9 meters longer than the Northampton-class at 261.5m, they're both around 60m across at the maximum cross-section.  The Charles de Gaulle carries 30-40 aircraft on average.  The Italian navy's flagship, the aircraft carrier Cavour, is smaller than a typical Northampton-class at 244m long and 39m wide at maximum cross-section, and still carries 10 F-35B's and 12 helicopters as standard.  Spain's Juan Carlos I-class is 231m long and 32m wide and typically carries about 23 fighter/attack aircraft.  That's not by any means an exhaustive list.

The Northampton-class is plenty big enough to function as a light aircraft carrier at 252.5m long.  Most aircraft carriers are around 250m long.  300m+ is pretty much just a US, China, and Russia thing.  Well, maybe just a US and China thing since Russia's only carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, is drydocked and rotting.

Even Circle FANKY, who came up with their own light carrier version of it for their doujinshi, found enough internal space to fit a round dozen or more VF-11s into the Northampton-class's unmodified hull.  Their own fanmade carrier variant, which is the same size as the official version, just slaps a carrier deck on the underside and holds 25.

 

58 minutes ago, SebastianP said:

There are seriously only two solutions: Either the ships aren't 250 meters long, or they're not Northampton-class ships.

Or... and hear me out... you are operating under more than a few misconceptions in a variety of areas.

As we've demonstrated above, key areas of your argument do not stand up to fact-checking.

Edited 17 hours ago by Seto Kaiba

[SebastianP]

6 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

No, it's an animation error if it's off-model without an in-story or production explanation.  If it's off model and it has an in-story or explicit production explanation, then it's not an animation error.  (For instance, Max's vertical stabilizer missiles in the original series are an attempt to address an animation error after animators noticed mid-production they drew more missiles being fired than the VF-1 actually carried.)

Whether it affects the plot or not is irrelevant.  Mistakes happen.  

When the mistake has gotten to the point that a whole episode that would not make sense without the mistake has been made around it, it kind of stops being a mistake and has to start being counted as "real" - or a Munchhausen tale, which given the episode's relevance to the whole plot of the show, unravels Macross 7 as a credible source.

 

6 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

My good fellow, there are real world aircraft carriers in service right now that are the same size or smaller than the Northampton-class.

The Northampton-class stealth frigate is 252.5m long according to its Macross Chronicle Mechanic Sheet.

France's Clemenceau-class aircraft carrier, including the French navy flagship Charles de Gaulle, clocks in at just 9 meters longer than the Northampton-class at 261.5m, they're both around 60m across at the maximum cross-section.  The Charles de Gaulle carries 30-40 aircraft on average.  The Italian navy's flagship, the aircraft carrier Cavour, is smaller than a typical Northampton-class at 244m long and 39m wide at maximum cross-section, and still carries 10 F-35B's and 12 helicopters as standard.  Spain's Juan Carlos I-class is 231m long and 32m wide and typically carries about 23 fighter/attack aircraft.  That's not by any means an exhaustive list.

The Northampton-class is plenty big enough to function as a light aircraft carrier at 252.5m long.  Most aircraft carriers are around 250m long.  300m+ is pretty much just a US, China, and Russia thing.  Well, maybe just a US and China thing since Russia's only carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, is drydocked and rotting.

Even Circle FANKY, who came up with their own light carrier version of it for their doujinshi, found enough internal space to fit a round dozen or more VF-11s into the Northampton-class's unmodified hull.  Their own fanmade carrier variant, which is the same size as the official version, just slaps a carrier deck on the underside and holds 25.

You are looking at the length and widths of ships that are almost perfect boxes (by design, in order to maximize the internal volume usable to store aircraft), to justify that a ship where the usable volume where any hangar would be located, in the front two thirds of the ship, is an almost a perfect rhomboid pyramid with one sixth of the box volume - has enough volume to be a carrier. I *know* carriers. I build models of carriers. 

In the background, the first carrier model I had on hand that is around the right size - a model of the cancelled Soviet carrier Ulyanovsk that I made a couple of months ago. Notice first of all that it is mostly a box, with a pointy front end (below the flight deck). The hangar is about two thirds the length of the ship, stretching *all* the way back to the stern, and up to just in front of where the forward elevator is. It's not the most efficient carrier, it could have had a longer hangar, but Soviets would be Soviets and decided on a huge missile battery instead of more hangar space. Despite being so large and so boxy, the planned hangar capacity was 22 VF-sized fixed wing aircraft and 12 (relatively tiny) helicopters. The rest of the air wing would sit on the deck or be aloft.

Juan Carlos, which I have drawings of, is even more of a box, with even more of its length devoted to a full width hangar. 

By contrast, in the foreground is the game model of the standard Northampton, at the official size of 252.5 meters. Now, there is room for a box capable of containing a handful of aircraft in there. But what is critically missing is any way of getting those aircraft out. The gill intake is not big enough for any VF - maybe an AIF-7S Ghost, but nothing larger, not even a VF-1. You could, possibly, add ARMD-style launch ports - big rectangular ones - but capacity will be very limited by the shape of the hull - it tapers in every direction, quite sharply, and is nowhere near as voluminous, especially for things that would like a flat deck to sit on, as you'd think. Maybe the black voids in the back of the arrowhead shape are holes into a hangar volume. But that's still not going to be a very large volume and not one animation source uses them as such. 

As for the FANKY illustration, I believe you are misremembering it, because I have it in front of me. The top half of the illustration was FANKY's own carrier conversion of the Northampton, where the artist did whatever it took to squeeze in the 37 participants of Operation Stargazer into a 250 meter, roughly Northampton shaped hull. And I say "roughly" because the result was wider in the whole middle section, considerably taller, and used three whole triple-height decks as a hangar, and *still* didn't launch the fighters like the Stargazer. 

And the bottom half of the FANKY drawing in question shows how they estimated thirteen VF-25s in the hangar of the ARMD-L, by assuming the hangar was nearly as wide as the flight deck to a depth of three decks (it's not, the hull narrows much more rapidly below the flight deck than FANKY account for); and puts the "humanoid maintenance hangar" in the back of the ship... where the actual ARMD-L has a huge void because that's where the arm and hand of the Macross Quarter goes. 

I stand by my conclusion:

Either the Chronicle is wrong, and the ships are larger. By the "newest depiction is more accurate" rule, I can go as far as to posit that the Stargazer was *actually* a Gefion-type, that the fighters launched like they do in Macross 30 (because it makes the most sense in hindsight), and that all other depictions are the animation errors because none of those are plot-relevant.

Or the Chronicle is correct on the size, which means that there can't be a carrier version of the Northampton (since neither animated version has enough volume for what we see launch off of them canonically, and we have to write off Macross 7 and Macross 30 as The tales of Baron Munchhausen.

Or, the Chronicle is correct on the size, but neither the Gefion nor the Stargazer were actually Northamptons, but were instead actually Guantamamo-class carriers (which would be more appropriate anyway). 

Edit: I have made some measurements, and come to the conclusion that purely volume-wise, I can fit a hangar sized for about a dozen fighters in the hull of a Northampton 2059, with enough height to lift them out over each other. But the ship would need ARMD-like launch ports in the sides of the hull right around where the "gills" are. This is *not* what we see in Operation Stargazer or in Macross 30, but it's the closest I can get to a 250 meter ship with the Northampton hull profile and a hangar. 

Edited 11 hours ago by SebastianP

[Seto Kaiba]

4 hours ago, SebastianP said:

When the mistake has gotten to the point that a whole episode that would not make sense without the mistake has been made around it, it kind of stops being a mistake and has to start being counted as "real" - or a Munchhausen tale, which given the episode's relevance to the whole plot of the show, unravels Macross 7 as a credible source.

Nobody else seems to struggle with the premise that the two or three scenes in that episode that depict the Northampton-class as unusually roomy or launching fighters from ports that shouldn't be able to fit them are anything but animation errors.

The creators of Macross 7 have had 30 years to correct the size of the Northampton-class based on that scene if it really is not an animation error.  They haven't changed its size.

 

 

4 hours ago, SebastianP said:

You are looking at the length and widths of ships [...]

Cutting straight to the point, you asserted that the Northampton-class was not big enough to be an aircraft carrier and I pointed out that it's actually about the same size as many modern aircraft carriers.  You yourself then provided a visual aid that shows that, yes, the Northampton-class (Frontier version) is comparable in size to an aircraft carrier.

We both agree that it's absolutely not set up to BE one, but that's beside that particular point.  It's still large enough to hold a nontrivial number of Valkyries internally, as you agree later on.

That's why Macross 30 introduced a carrier conversion of one in the form of the Gefion... to specifically address the point of egress.  It's a model from a video game so it's not in perfect scale in-game, but it suffices.

 

4 hours ago, SebastianP said:

As for the FANKY illustration, I believe you are misremembering it, because I have it in front of me. The top half of the illustration was FANKY's own carrier conversion of the Northampton, where the artist did whatever it took to squeeze in the 37 participants of Operation Stargazer into a 250 meter, roughly Northampton shaped hull. And I say "roughly" because the result was wider in the whole middle section, considerably taller, and used three whole triple-height decks as a hangar, and *still* didn't launch the fighters like the Stargazer. 

I was looking at it when I wrote my post, and I'm looking at it again now... it is the same size as the stock Northampton-class in terms of length and width of the hull.  It's very very slightly taller, but all they really did was slap a carrier deck on the bottom of the ship and call it a day.  That deck only protrudes slightly from the ship's diamond profile.  Yes, they use most of the ship's interior as hangar space, but that was already true for the Gefion as well (at least in the novel).  They actually only use two decks as hangar space, the third (uppermost) is equipment storage according to their diagram.

Even if you omit the largest and lowermost deck, the only one that changed the Northampton's profile, they still show you can theoretically fit a dozen or so VF-11s into a single Northampton-class in a plausible manner.

 

4 hours ago, SebastianP said:

I stand by my conclusion:

Standing by a conclusion that doesn't tally with the facts isn't a particularly useful stance to take.

Anyway, the official size of the Northampton-class is 252.5 meters long.  We know the episode of Macross 7 contains animation errors that mistakenly represent the Stargazer as larger than it actually is.  We accept that these are errors and move on with life.  Pobody's nerfect.

By your own admission, the Northampton-class is actually big enough to hold a dozen or so Valkyries.  The Gefion-type solves the problem of "how do they get out" with the two modest gates and hangar decks added to the sides of the design.  Yeah, the game model doesn't make the gates quite big enough to allow the very largest craft available in the game to work that way, but it's a game and that's just acceptable breaks with reality in action the same as the ship's hammerspace arsenal of every VF you unlock in-game.  For rational purposes, we can assume they're not actually present or not actually canonically used.

 Ukyo Kodachi's novelization of Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy does confirm the Gefion is a modified Northampton-class stealth frigate, so we can safely assume that she really is 252.5 meters in length.

[SebastianP]

45 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Nobody else seems to struggle with the premise that the two or three scenes in that episode that depict the Northampton-class as unusually roomy or launching fighters from ports that shouldn't be able to fit them are anything but animation errors.

The creators of Macross 7 have had 30 years to correct the size of the Northampton-class based on that scene if it really is not an animation error.  They haven't changed its size.

 

You mean, no one else who frequents this site has the energy to argue with someone who refuses to budge on "the books are always right".

45 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Cutting straight to the point, you asserted that the Northampton-class was not big enough to be an aircraft carrier and I pointed out that it's actually about the same size as many modern aircraft carriers.  You yourself then provided a visual aid that shows that, yes, the Northampton-class (Frontier version) is comparable in size to an aircraft carrier.

We both agree that it's absolutely not set up to BE one, but that's beside that particular point.  It's still large enough to hold a nontrivial number of Valkyries internally, as you agree later on.

That's why Macross 30 introduced a carrier conversion of one in the form of the Gefion... to specifically address the point of egress.  It's a model from a video game so it's not in perfect scale in-game, but it suffices.

It's not the length, it's the shape. An aircraft carrier is has an optimized shape for volume, and basically every carrier has a rectangular hangar that goes from the stern of the ship up to two third to three quarters if its full length, and the full width of the ship. The Northampton class can *at most* use *one* third of its length as a hangar, and the bit it can use is only marginally wider than normal carrier. The volume usable for a hangar is only big enough for about a dozen fighters, packed like sardines (i.e. not with the kind of walkaround space that you'd want on a real carrier). And no version of the ship has the kind of hangar access port which would be required in order to *use* this space - you'd need Star Wars Style side mounted hangar doors on both sides to turn this into anything close to an acceptable "baby carrier", and that's not what's been done for *any* of the three attempts at it.

45 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

I was looking at it when I wrote my post, and I'm looking at it again now... it is the same size as the stock Northampton-class in terms of length and width of the hull.  It's very very slightly taller, but all they really did was slap a carrier deck on the bottom of the ship and call it a day.  That deck only protrudes slightly from the ship's diamond profile.  Yes, they use most of the ship's interior as hangar space, but that was already true for the Gefion as well (at least in the novel).  They actually only use two decks as hangar space, the third (uppermost) is equipment storage according to their diagram.

If the upper deck is just storage, the the capacity is just 29 fighters. But okay.

The whole reason why I am even arguing this is because, if I want to use the Gefion design in a 3D scene, doing its thing, I need to make it 1000 meters long, to be visually consistent with what we see in the game (i.e. being able to walk a battroid in there.) My brain does not allow me to fudge things, things have to fit at true size, or my brain hurts. 

If the Gefion has to be 1000 meters long to support the best scale-able visuals, then I will also need to make the Northampton the same size, because it is the same ship. Again, my brain would hurt because of the inconistency if I didn't. 

Similarly, the Guantanamo-class, at least the one I have, also has features from the anime that my brain says "this has to be *this big* to work properly, So I sized the ship appropriately. If I had a model based on the *other* Guantanamo shooting model (the "Maizuru" model, instead of the "Maiduru"; I wouldn't have so much of a problem, but I *might* just go with "if there's two inconsistent models, they might be different ships". Which is a common trick in for example the Star Wars fandom. 

I also arrive at this from *several* fandoms where "if the number obviously doesn't fit, throw it out and calculate the actual one" is what we *do*. A building consistently shown with 30 floors is obviously not going to be 100 feet tall, it's going to be 100 meters tall. If a ship is obviously more than ten times the size of another ship, of course it's not going to be just 5 times the size even if the books have said so for 20 years.

So what I'm doing is I'm using the official models to figure out what I think is the actual size implied by the VFX shots, just like fans have been doing in every other Sci Fi franchise since the dawn of DVD freeze frames, and checking how weird things looks if I use those sizes. The answer, so far, is "not very", despite the Uraga being unchanged size-wise. There just aren't all that many shots of the Uraga model dwarfing a Northampton that I'd need to ignore. 

And I will never really accept a book size figure if the very first instance where that size would have become relevant, flat out ignored it for plot reasons. It literally has the same vibe as the time the studio that animated all the VFX for Stargate SG-1 made the whole Daedalus ship at 650 meters long, down to the bridge and hangar interiors, and because someone corporate wrote "225 meters" in a DVD liner booklet, the ship is now officially so small that the fighters it launches out by the dozens will not actually fit through the hangar bay doors that are now a third of the size they were designed to be. 

Edited 6 hours ago by SebastianP

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, SebastianP said:

You mean, no one else who frequents this site has the energy to argue with someone who refuses to budge on "the books are always right".

No, I mean most Macross fans understand that animation errors are a thing and don't assume that a single moment of off-model animation overrules decades of official material from the people who make the show.

That kind of questionable reasoning is more in line with another fandom that we don't talk about here.

 

1 hour ago, SebastianP said:

The whole reason why I am even arguing this is because, if I want to use the Gefion design in a 3D scene, doing its thing, I need to make it 1000 meters long, to be visually consistent with what we see in the game (i.e. being able to walk a battroid in there.) My brain does not allow me to fudge things, things have to fit at true size, or my brain hurts. 

Your particular preferences don't mean the official information is wrong, though.

You know that Macross 30's game engine is not representing the Valkyries, ships, etc. at true scale.  You didn't need me or anyone else to tell you that.  Your struggle seems to be because you chose to change the size of the ship rather than acknowledge that the game employs some acceptable breaks with realism to allow the characters to operate a lot more VFs than is realistic or accept that the animation is not perfect.

What you do with your own fanworks is nobody's business but yours.  People are going to raise eyebrows or argue if you go around telling people you know better than the show's actual creators, though.

Edited 5 hours ago by Seto Kaiba
Edited for tone.

[SebastianP]

10 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

What you do with your own fanworks is nobody's business but yours.  People are going to raise eyebrows or argue if you go around telling people you know better than the show's actual creators, though.

And some people - demonstrably, because this is what happened in the other place I've been posting about it - go "okay, your argument is convincing, What does this mean for the other ships? Which ships can we do similar comparisons to?" because most of them are also Star Wars fans who remember when the Executor was changed from 8 km to 19 km because of determined fans fact-checking Lucasfilm until they gave up; Star Trek fans who remember when the Defiant would change size from episode to episode; Stargate fans who used screen evidence to prove the liner notes false years before the VFX people chimed in and said "yeah, we actually made it three times bigger and some dude in PR pulled a number out of his behind and since we no longer work for the rights holders we can't change it". 

It's said that during the middle ages, a learned man who was asked "how many teeth does a horse have", he'd go find his copy of Aristotle's textbook on the matter, and go "Aristotle says it has X teeth, therefore that is the answer." 

One of the hallmarks of the Renaissance was when the default option shifted to "I don't know, lets go to the stable and check". 

You, my friend... are being medieval in mindset, and trusting the Philosopher over your own senses. 

[JB0]

3 hours ago, SebastianP said:

You mean, no one else who frequents this site has the energy to argue with someone who refuses to budge on "the books are always right".

Nah.

 

1 hour ago, SebastianP said:

Star Wars fans who remember when the Executor was changed from 8 km to 19 km because of determined fans fact-checking Lucasfilm until they gave up

And that number is still considered very wrong, so what did the fans actually win?

And the official Death Star sizes that originated with the West End RPG are still unchanged despite being far more difficult to reconcile with the films.

[Seto Kaiba]

10 minutes ago, SebastianP said:

And some people - [...]

Some people will, sure... that doesn't mean the argument is sound.

Most people - fans and casual viewers alike - simply accept the easily verifiable reality that these occasional inconsistencies are mistakes that were made in production and not anything meant to have significance to the setting or the narrative.

For example, you don't see Star Trek fans arguing that the USS Enterprise-A is three times her stated size in Star Trek V because the deck numbers in the turboshaft scene show numbers as high as 78 (and in reverse order) on a ship that only has 23 decks.  It's just a mistake in set dressing and nothing more.  Same as when, in Star Trek: Nemesis, Riker somehow kicks the Viceroy down into an inexplicable bottomless pit on the lowest deck of the ship (29)... somehow five decks below the previous lowest deck of the ship (24).  Just a dumb mistake.

To give another, you don't see Star Wars fans claiming the Millennium Falcon doesn't actually have a radar dish based on the fact that it's MIA when the ship is first seen in A New Hope.  Or that Anakin obviously visited our galaxy to buy lightsaber parts given that the bottom of his lightsaber in Empire clearly bears the stamped words "MANUFACTURED BY GRAFLEX" and "ROCHESTER NY USA".  Or that the Republic has only actually been around for 1,000 years based on Palpatine's dialog in the prequels.

Sometimes... a lot of the time... an error is just an error.  No hidden messages, no secret authorial intent.  Just an honest-to-goodness screwup that didn't get caught.