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.)

[PixelatedShinobi]

Here's something interesting/annoying (your pick, really)

SRWY has got me thinking about the 31JKAI for the first time in a while, and I noticed something - it doesn't actually appear in Zettai Live? In the opening battle of Zettai Live against the Vivasvats, the Delta Flight Siggys are all equipped with LilDrakens in a fun bit of crosscultural cooperation - but interestingly, Hayate appears to have the wrong VF. Consistently (I've checked multiple shots), his VF appears to be his base 31J with LilDrakens equipped as opposed to his 31JKAI from the end of Delta TV. I'd think this is just a thing where they wanted to keep that exclusive to the TV anime, but (due to footage reuse at the end of Passionate Walkure), the 31JKAI *does* appear in the movie timeline.

I don't think there's really a point to my post, but it's interesting, at least?

 

 

[Seto Kaiba]

12 minutes ago, PixelatedShinobi said:

SRWY has got me thinking about the 31JKAI for the first time in a while, and I noticed something - it doesn't actually appear in Zettai Live? In the opening battle of Zettai Live against the Vivasvats, the Delta Flight Siggys are all equipped with LilDrakens in a fun bit of crosscultural cooperation - but interestingly, Hayate appears to have the wrong VF. Consistently (I've checked multiple shots), his VF appears to be his base 31J with LilDrakens equipped as opposed to his 31JKAI from the end of Delta TV. I'd think this is just a thing where they wanted to keep that exclusive to the TV anime, but (due to footage reuse at the end of Passionate Walkure), the 31JKAI *does* appear in the movie timeline..

I don't think there's really a point to my post, but it's interesting, at least?

Huh.  I guess I've been under a rock because I didn't know Super Robot Wars Y was even out. 😆

Anyway, that noise you heard was my brain changing gears without a clutch because I honestly could not remember of the J改 was exclusive to the TV series or not.

Turns out, yeah... it's not a thing in the movie timeline.  The VF-31J改 only exists in the Macross Delta TV series version where Hayate's original VF-31J is destroyed on Ragna when the New UN Spacy attempts to sink the Sigur Berrentzs with a thermonuclear reaction bomb.  Hayate uses Messer's VF-31F for a while after that and then switches to using the VF-31J改 for the series finale.

'course, I wouldn't be me if I stopped there would I?  I decided to look into whether there are any actual differences between the VF-31J and VF-31J改... and the answer I found is "Not really".  The identified differences all relate to software and calibrations, with the flight control program including some data from when Hayate was using Messer's VF-31F.  The rest is just the settings of the programmable anti-beam coating the VF-31s and Sv-262s use in lieu of paint. 

The aircraft's colors and markings are just settings programmed into what is essentially the lovechild of an e-paper flexible display and a vinyl vehicle wrap that covers the entirety of the aircraft's armor skin and also functions as ablative armor against energy weapons.  Theoretically, Hayate could change the colors of his VF-31 just as easily as Mirage changes the colors of the Sv-262Ba she steals in Passionate Walkure.  If he wanted to add some black accents and a personal mark to commemorate Messer, it wouldn't require anything except a design to feed into the system and he could change the settings back whenever the mood struck him.

Spoiler

Worse, the system is described as video-capable too... so a truly unhinged person could conceivably do all kinds of interesting and potentially unprofessional things with their aircraft's appearance.  Not only could those itasha paintjobs from Macross Delta Scramble easily be official setting designs, it could get SO MUCH WORSE from there if there's someone suitably degenerate and unsupervised.

So it's a continuity error caused by recycled footage, but also something that can be explained away very very easily.

[PixelatedShinobi]

37 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Huh.  I guess I've been under a rock because I didn't know Super Robot Wars Y was even out. 😆

It's really excellent. The animations have certainly taken a quality dip due to how expensive modern game development is, but the /plot/ is the best in a decade at least, and backed up by a ton of very well-drawn CGs. Delta specifically has been given the usual SRW treatment of a "hybridized" approach, mostly following Passionate Walkure's major beats but using plot points and elements from TV to make it work in the unified setting and stretch out the movie's events to cover an entire game.

 

51 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

The aircraft's colors and markings are just settings programmed into what is essentially the lovechild of an e-paper flexible display and a vinyl vehicle wrap that covers the entirety of the aircraft's armor skin and also functions as ablative armor against energy weapons.  Theoretically, Hayate could change the colors of his VF-31 just as easily as Mirage changes the colors of the Sv-262Ba she steals in Passionate Walkure.  If he wanted to add some black accents and a personal mark to commemorate Messer, it wouldn't require anything except a design to feed into the system and he could change the settings back whenever the mood struck him.

  Hide contents

Worse, the system is described as video-capable too... so a truly unhinged person could conceivably do all kinds of interesting and potentially unprofessional things with their aircraft's appearance.  Not only could those itasha paintjobs from Macross Delta Scramble easily be official setting designs, it could get SO MUCH WORSE from there if there's someone suitably degenerate and unsupervised.

So it's a continuity error caused by recycled footage, but also something that can be explained away very very easily.

 

This is the last thing some poor Var'd soldier saw before he died.

But yeah, it's just an indication of how slapdash Passionate Walkure was and it's not like it's continuity breaking or anything. I must admit I never really even /noticed/ the black accents until SRWY, I had just always assumed the KAI was simply Hayate's custom reaper insignia. I hope we get a (presumably premium bandai) exclusive variant of the new High Grade with the KAI detailing. 

[Seto Kaiba]

7 hours ago, PixelatedShinobi said:

It's really excellent. The animations have certainly taken a quality dip due to how expensive modern game development is, but the /plot/ is the best in a decade at least, and backed up by a ton of very well-drawn CGs. Delta specifically has been given the usual SRW treatment of a "hybridized" approach, mostly following Passionate Walkure's major beats but using plot points and elements from TV to make it work in the unified setting and stretch out the movie's events to cover an entire game.

Pretty normal for a Macross inclusion then... the same approach Kawamori normally uses.  Drawing on both versions freely and interchangeably with an explanation that's a polite-ish way of saying "I do what I want". 😆

 

7 hours ago, PixelatedShinobi said:

This is the last thing some poor Var'd soldier saw before he died.

 

Yep... thanks to that smart coating technology, there's strictly speaking nothing stopping anyone in-setting from doing something like the above... which is an official plamodel kit with official decals.  (The Bandai 1/72 Roid Brehm use Sv-262Hs Draken III.)

Then again, the Frontier New UN Spacy didn't seem to mind its pilots putting racy paintings on their strictly-military-issue aircraft even without the benefit of the programmable smart coating:

How Maruyama sold his superiors on this paintjob for frontline combat use might just be the greatest story never told.  That's his commanding officer's girlfriend!

Well, that or how Canaria Bernstein persuaded the famously overprotective Ozma Lee to let her paint an explicit picture of his little sister Ranka on her VB-6 Konig Monster... 🙃

 

 

7 hours ago, PixelatedShinobi said:

But yeah, it's just an indication of how slapdash Passionate Walkure was and it's not like it's continuity breaking or anything. I must admit I never really even /noticed/ the black accents until SRWY, I had just always assumed the KAI was simply Hayate's custom reaper insignia. I hope we get a (presumably premium bandai) exclusive variant of the new High Grade with the KAI detailing. 

Passionate Walkure was at least partly a compilation movie, so I wouldn't call that "slapdash" so much as "par for the course".

Normally when a protagonist switches machines in a Macross story they move to a completely different and visually distinct aircraft.  I think Macross Delta might be the first time the protagonist switches back to the old machine with a different paintjob.

[pengbuzz]

9 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Yep... thanks to that smart coating technology, there's strictly speaking nothing stopping anyone in-setting from doing something like the above... which is an official plamodel kit with official decals.  (The Bandai 1/72 Roid Brehm use Sv-262Hs Draken III.)

One thought: use the smart coating to display the background behind them. May not be true optical stealth, but it'd certainly mess with an enemy pilot's visuals!

*Yeah, I know there's a bunch of reasons this wouldn't work. Just being my usual self here!*

Edited 4 hours ago by pengbuzz

[Seto Kaiba]

5 minutes ago, pengbuzz said:

One thought: use the smart coating to display the background behind them. May not be true optical stealth, but it'd certainly mess with an enemy pilot's visuals!

*Yeah, I know there's a bunch of reasons this wouldn't work. Just being my usual self here!*

While that probably wouldn't be very useful in combat given the main detection and ranging systems are non-visual (radar, lidar, infrared), that's not to say it wouldn't be very useful in a defensive context.

Using the programmable coating to make the exterior of a parked aircraft match the color and texture of the ground underneath them would go quite a ways towards hiding aircraft from aerial or satellite photography.  Like the camouflage netting used to conceal aircraft on the ground today, but built directly into the aircraft.

We also see Delta Flight switch seamlessly from airshow colors to low-viz greys at one point in the series, which would also be very useful for avoiding detection and identification by strictly visual means (since they have active stealth to hide from radar).