Super Macross Mecha Fun Time Discussion Thread!

[JB0]

15 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Hiroshi Onogi apparently didn't just write Macross Zero in the real world, he wrote the book that became the in-universe docu-drama of Macross Zero's events too!

I'm glad to hear he survived the zentradi bombardment in 2010.

[cheemingwan1234]

Do the Zentraedi mix different clone strains together in the same unit when it comes to foot soldiers or are there Zentraedi units with only one clone type for foot soldiers?

 

Edited October 6 by cheemingwan1234

[Seto Kaiba]

14 minutes ago, cheemingwan1234 said:

Do the Zentraedi mix different clone strains together in the same unit when it comes to foot soldiers or are there Zentraedi units with only one clone type?

Not entirely sure what you mean by "clone strains" there.

Macross Chronicle's WorldGuide sheet for the Zentradi describes there as being essentially three main types:

• Ordinary soldier type (e.g. Warera, Roli, Conda, Milia)
• Records/Staff officer type (e.g. Exsedol, Tranquil)
• Commander type (e.g. Vrlitwhai, Quamzin, Laplamiz, Boddole Zer)

We do see Commanders occasionally take to the field with their troops.  Quamzin's the poster boy for that.  He's a Commander type and his men are ordinary soldier types.  

Macross Chronicle's Character Sheet "Zentradi Soldiers" (SDFM TV Zentradi 08A) has a note on the line art of the various Zentradi background characters used in the Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series that explains why they all look different.  The Zentradi are all clones, but they're cloned from a large number of different genetic patterns so each force has considerable diversity of attributes among its soldiers.  (Presumably this is more advantageous than just cloning the same guy a billion times the way the Republic did in Star Wars.)

[JB0]

22 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

The Zentradi are all clones, but they're cloned from a large number of different genetic patterns so each force has considerable diversity of attributes among its soldiers.  (Presumably this is more advantageous than just cloning the same guy a billion times the way the Republic did in Star Wars.)

Makes sense. Disease won't rip through an entire unit, and can't be attacked by a custom-engineered bioweapon that targets a specific genetic sequence.

 

On the other hand, it results in soldiers with diverse heights and builds, complicating supply of equipment. But the protoculture seemed to have solved supply lines with their typical excess.

[TG Remix]

12 hours ago, JB0 said:

On 10/5/2025 at 9:46 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

The Zentradi are all clones, but they're cloned from a large number of different genetic patterns so each force has considerable diversity of attributes among its soldiers.  (Presumably this is more advantageous than just cloning the same guy a billion times the way the Republic did in Star Wars.)

Makes sense. Disease won't rip through an entire unit, and can't be attacked by a custom-engineered bioweapon that targets a specific genetic sequence.

 

On the other hand, it results in soldiers with diverse heights and builds, complicating supply of equipment. But the protoculture seemed to have solved supply lines with their typical excess.

Which serves to be ironic as when humans started to clone themselves to bolster their numbers to avoid extinction, they had to stop because they came across the issue of hereditary children's diseases popping up 2 decades after. 

 

It seems like DYRL made the cloning process a bit more uniform, as the trio seem to be a lot closer in size then they were in the TV series, not mentioning how Exsedol and Britai doesn't have as noticeable of a height disparity as well. 

[JB0]

3 hours ago, TG Remix said:

Which serves to be ironic as when humans started to clone themselves to bolster their numbers to avoid extinction, they had to stop because they came across the issue of hereditary children's diseases popping up 2 decades after. 

Zentradi don't have to worry about hereditary diseases, since there's no inheritance. Protoculture thought of everything!

...

Well, everything except "how to dispose of an evil time machine", "how to dispose of a galaxy-wide brain asploder", "how to stop your clone army from waging tntal war across your empire", and "how to keep interdimensional space vampires from destroying your civilization". Minor details, though. They thought of all the important things!

[Seto Kaiba]

6 hours ago, TG Remix said:

Which serves to be ironic as when humans started to clone themselves to bolster their numbers to avoid extinction, they had to stop because they came across the issue of hereditary children's diseases popping up 2 decades after. 

Yeah, that's the problem with having a limited breeding population with limited genetic diversity.  You end up reinforcing recessive traits, some of which are potentially detrimental.  Fortunately there were about a million surviving Humans after the war so the genetic diversity wasn't catastrophically low.

The Zentradi ran into their own problems once they started reproducing naturally too.  Like Klan Klang's "clumsy" genes that affect her usage of the miclone system.  

(Given that Master File indicates the New UN Gov't eventually solved the Zentradi "fighting instincts" problem with gene therapy, one has to wonder if they solved the problems from that initial extensive use of cloning Humans the same way.  They could potentially wipe out all kinds of diseases and potentially-fatal conditions that way, as we're starting to do now in the real world with potential gene-editing cures for things like HIV and Down syndrome.)

 

6 hours ago, TG Remix said:

It seems like DYRL made the cloning process a bit more uniform, as the trio seem to be a lot closer in size then they were in the TV series, not mentioning how Exsedol and Britai doesn't have as noticeable of a height disparity as well. 

They compressed the range of heights for the Zentradi a bit in the movie version, yeah.  

[aurance]

A million people is orders of magnitude above what you would need to minimize recessive disorders. I suspect the hereditary diseases have more to do with the cloning itself than limited numbers, although they do tend to complicate other without some management.

[Seto Kaiba]

6 minutes ago, aurance said:

A million people is orders of magnitude above what you would need to minimize recessive disorders. I suspect the hereditary diseases have more to do with the cloning itself than limited numbers, although they do tend to complicate other without some management.

Between you and me, I suspect it likely owes a fair bit to the fact that those ~1 million people who survived the First Space War by luck or good judgement ultimately spread out a bit rather than staying in a single large community.  It's not just the survivors on Luna or in the space colony clusters at the Lagrange points.  The survivors living on Earth spread out and founded a bunch of small towns and a couple small cities as we saw in the postwar arc of Super Dimension Fortress Macross.  If the clones chose to live in or near those same small communities, you could end up with populations small enough for that to start to become an issue.

(One male soldier in the postwar arc implies that men outnumber women after the war, so it's possible that a cloning with an eye towards rebalancing the gender ratio may have contributed as well.)