Super Macross Mecha Fun Time Discussion Thread!

[Seto Kaiba]

On 12/10/2025 at 9:23 PM, RangerKarl said:

Deniable wetworks is my first thought. It is a VF designed to precisely attack targets deep inside enemy lines without resorting to reaction weapons, after all. This sort of headhunter work sounds in line with SuperNova specifications

Not sure how deniable a several-hundred-megawatt laser cannon strike from a light second away would be.  It's not a capability that most forces would have, so it'd be pretty easy to narrow it down.  It'd definitely be sudden and unexpected, though a VF would not even be able to close the distance in a reasonable span of time to capitalize on the strike without a fold booster.  (Even at 7km/s that's a 14 hour flight.)

It is described as being use for "sniping" though... a more correct use of the word than what goes on in Frontier at the very least, shooting from a frigging light second away.

The particle beam version is described as having been used in a stealth counterterrorism operation that involved ambushing a small fleet of rebel Zentradi ships occupying a factory satellite and disabling them by shooting out their power systems.

[RangerKarl]

My read of it was that the operator would fly in and settle on some space debris like how Michel does, and settle in to watch a point in space for a period of time? 

I guess if you wanted to shoot a VVIP coming into dock and you had a couple weeks to set up. Some silly spy nonsense like that, I would say. 

  

11 hours ago, aurance said:

This would be a pretty limited scenario, presumably only against rebel colonists or other protoculture sub-races (which all seem to be fairly primitive). I don't think action against Zentradi or Supervision Army forces would need any deniability.

I sorta read Supernova as being partly about suppressing dissent, to be honest. This was the ramp-up to the VF-X2 events, and there was skullduggery afoot. Maybe that's just me being too deep into technothrillers though.

 

Edited December 13 by RangerKarl
added reply

[pengbuzz]

11 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Not sure how deniable a several-hundred-megawatt laser cannon strike from a light second away would be.  It's not a capability that most forces would have, so it'd be pretty easy to narrow it down.  It'd definitely be sudden and unexpected, though a VF would not even be able to close the distance in a reasonable span of time to capitalize on the strike without a fold booster.  (Even at 7km/s that's a 14 hour flight.)

It is described as being use for "sniping" though... a more correct use of the word than what goes on in Frontier at the very least, shooting from a frigging light second away.

The particle beam version is described as having been used in a stealth counterterrorism operation that involved ambushing a small fleet of rebel Zentradi ships occupying a factory satellite and disabling them by shooting out their power systems.

Wait... isn't a light second basically:

Spoiler

The distance between The Earth and the moon?

 

[Seto Kaiba]

4 hours ago, RangerKarl said:

My read of it was that the operator would fly in and settle on some space debris like how Michel does, and settle in to watch a point in space for a period of time? 

That seems to be what Master File is implying for the laser version, yeah.

Though how one shoots a fast-moving target effectively from a light second away is anyone's guess.

 

4 hours ago, RangerKarl said:

I sorta read Supernova as being partly about suppressing dissent, to be honest. This was the ramp-up to the VF-X2 events, and there was skullduggery afoot. Maybe that's just me being too deep into technothrillers though.

Oh, it was.  Col. Johnson frames it as such in Macross Plus.

Basically, the New UN Forces took the use of their next-generation main Variable Fighter in internal conflicts into consideration when laying out the requirements for the prototype designs tested in Project Super Nova.  They wanted their Next Main Fighter to be able to use its high mobility, high stealth performance, and independent fold capability to resolve conflicts quickly and with the minimum necessary use of force by slipping behind enemy lines to do things like rescue hostages, strike enemy command centers, and generally take the fight out of the enemy without needing to kill them en masse.  

 

4 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

Wait... isn't a light second basically:

  Hide contents

The distance between The Earth and the moon?

 

About 1.28 light seconds on average... but close enough for round number purposes yeah.

[pengbuzz]

On 12/13/2025 at 4:31 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

That seems to be what Master File is implying for the laser version, yeah.

Though how one shoots a fast-moving target effectively from a light second away is anyone's guess.

Very carefully, I would have to imagine!

 

On 12/13/2025 at 4:31 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

Oh, it was.  Col. Johnson frames it as such in Macross Plus.

Basically, the New UN Forces took the use of their next-generation main Variable Fighter in internal conflicts into consideration when laying out the requirements for the prototype designs tested in Project Super Nova.  They wanted their Next Main Fighter to be able to use its high mobility, high stealth performance, and independent fold capability to resolve conflicts quickly and with the minimum necessary use of force by slipping behind enemy lines to do things like rescue hostages, strike enemy command centers, and generally take the fight out of the enemy without needing to kill them en masse.  

And I would assume: not requiring the complexity of added moving parts from a fighter with a couple of alternate modes, as well as a squishy and delicate organic pilot in a cockpit that required consumables such as breathable oxygen, in addition to radiation shielding and control interfaces/ displays. 

 

On 12/13/2025 at 4:31 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

About 1.28 light seconds on average... but close enough for round number purposes yeah.

Yeah, that's what I thought (and good catch: it was 1.28! I hadn't caught that.).

[Seto Kaiba]

9 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

Very carefully, I would have to imagine!

Indeed, considering lightspeed delay in in effect both ways... it takes the beam a second to travel one light second to the target, but it also takes the reflected light or other EM waves being used to spot the target a second to reach the firer from the target (or two seconds if it's an active sensor sending out a beam that's reflected).  

Sniping over that distance is, frankly, pretty absurd unless you're shooting at stationary ships because you're going to have to essentially predict where the target is going to be 2-3 seconds from now... over a literally astronomical distance.

 

9 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

And I would assume: not requiring the complexity of added moving parts from a fighter with a couple of alternate modes, as well as a squishy and delicate organic pilot in a cockpit that required consumables such as breathable oxygen, in addition to radiation shielding and control interfaces/ displays. 

That's a whole other project, the X-9 Ghost Bird that was competing against Project Super Nova clandestinely.

Project Super Nova was still expecting a human pilot.

 

9 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

Yeah, that's what I thought (and good catch: it was 1.28! I hadn't caught that.).

Most people round it to "about 1" since there is some variation in distance.

[pengbuzz]

7 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Indeed, considering lightspeed delay in in effect both ways... it takes the beam a second to travel one light second to the target, but it also takes the reflected light or other EM waves being used to spot the target a second to reach the firer from the target (or two seconds if it's an active sensor sending out a beam that's reflected).  

Sniping over that distance is, frankly, pretty absurd unless you're shooting at stationary ships because you're going to have to essentially predict where the target is going to be 2-3 seconds from now... over a literally astronomical distance.

And that makes it n entire operation that I cannot imagine anyone really desiring to undertake if the targets aren't stationary.

 Given the large amount of opportunity for error/ "a miss", it would make more sense to simply dispatch a fighter closer to the target where such time-delay and distance would not impede success.

7 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

That's a whole other project, the X-9 Ghost Bird that was competing against Project Super Nova clandestinely.

Project Super Nova was still expecting a human pilot.

My mistake; I just realized you were talking about the Alpha-1 and Omega-1; for some reason, I thought you were speaking about the Ghost.  

Oops!

 

7 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Most people round it to "about 1" since there is some variation in distance.

Right; I think the Moon's orbit isn't perfectly circular.

Edited Thursday at 06:58 PM by pengbuzz

[Seto Kaiba]

On 12/18/2025 at 1:56 PM, pengbuzz said:

And that makes it n entire operation that I cannot imagine anyone really desiring to undertake if the targets aren't stationary.

 Given the large amount of opportunity for error/ "a miss", it would make more sense to simply dispatch a fighter closer to the target where such time-delay and distance would not impede success.

Yeah, that was my thought too... it'd be next to impossible to hit anything smaller than a large warship at a light second out when you have a 2+ second targeting delay.  It makes no sense as a sniper weapon unless your target's stationary, huge, or both and it wouldn't be powerful enough to be a significant threat to anything much larger than a Zentradi battleship.

Every now and then, Master File puts in something that is pure "rule of cool" and not quite practical... and also often weirdly on-brand feeling for the kind of insane "because we could" engineering Humans in the Macross universe practice.

 

On 12/18/2025 at 1:56 PM, pengbuzz said:

Right; I think the Moon's orbit isn't perfectly circular.

Yeah, it's +/- about 43,000km based on the most commonly used measurements.

Pretty much all orbits are elliptical to varying degrees because of the effects of gravity from objects outside any given two-body system.

A perfectly circular orbit is practically impossible in nature and would probably be a subtle but unmistakable sign that the Protoculture were up to some BS in the area.  Similar to the impossibility of Libera being an ice world given its distance from the Ballota star in Macross 7 or the airborne islands and kilometer-tall tree on Uroboros in Macross 30.

 

[pengbuzz]

16 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Yeah, that was my thought too... it'd be next to impossible to hit anything smaller than a large warship at a light second out when you have a 2+ second targeting delay.  It makes no sense as a sniper weapon unless your target's stationary, huge, or both and it wouldn't be powerful enough to be a significant threat to anything much larger than a Zentradi battleship.

Every now and then, Master File puts in something that is pure "rule of cool" and not quite practical... and also often weirdly on-brand feeling for the kind of insane "because we could" engineering Humans in the Macross universe practice.

Yeah; I surmised that as well. The ol' "let's wow'em with what we can pull off" thing.

 

16 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Yeah, it's +/- about 43,000km based on the most commonly used measurements.

Pretty much all orbits are elliptical to varying degrees because of the effects of gravity from objects outside any given two-body system.

A perfectly circular orbit is practically impossible in nature and would probably be a subtle but unmistakable sign that the Protoculture were up to some BS in the area.  Similar to the impossibility of Libera being an ice world given its distance from the Ballota star in Macross 7 or the airborne islands and kilometer-tall tree on Uroboros in Macross 30.

That sounds like a not-too bad opening to a Macross RPG campaign: a colony fleet comes across a planet whose moon has a perfectly circular orbit and ancient Protoculture ruins on the moon's surface. The commander decides to investigate this and sens the players in their valks to take a look...

[Gerli]

I wonder if there is a reason for Kawamori to not include horizontal stabilizers on the VF-1; if there is a pure mechanical or aesthetic reason to not include those into the design.