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.

 

[Seto Kaiba]

2 hours ago, Gerli said:

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.

To an extent, I feel like that's a product of the design's evolution and what was The Style At The Time.  I'm going to tell a bit of a story here, but stick with me... there IS a method to my madness I promise.

Back in the 1970s when Shoji Kawamori was still a student attending middle and high school in Yokohama, tailless delta wing designs were very popular as a futuristic fighter design in contemporary science fiction. 1974's Space Battleship Yamato made extensive use of them with iconic designs like the Cosmo Zero and Black Tiger throughout the 70s.  The Battlestar Galactica pilot that hit Japanese theaters in 1978 had the Colonial Viper.  And of course Mobile Suit Gundam had designs like the FF-X7 Core Fighter and a great many background designs like the Flymanta, Flyarrow, and Dopp.  

That seems to have informed some of his earliest design works in the period that led up to the creation of Super Dimension Fortress Macross after he joined Studio Nue.  If you look to the earliest of the designs credited as having evolved into the VF-1 Valkyrie - the "Flight Suit" flying powered suit - the design draws obvious inspiration from the Martin Marietta X-24 "Flying Flatiron".  A tailless delta lifting body design that was used to evaluate reentry and unpowered landing approaches that would be used in the space shuttle.  (One of the sister designs from the lifting body program, Northrop's M2-F2, appears to have been the inspiration for Miyatake's "Superbird" that evolved into the QF-3000E Ghost.)  The design for the Flight Suit later evolved into the larger "Breast Fighter" and began to take on some of the aspects of the VF-1's final design like the cannons mounted on the head, but was still more fantastical and super robot-y.  That version replaced the Flight Suit's vertical stabilisers with canted winglets at the wingtip similar to the Core Fighter's, but lacked both a vertical and horizontal stabilizer.  That version also gained some outward-canted fins on the lower legs similar to the VF-1's.  That design would then be polished a bit further, keeping a lot of the Breast Fighter's transformation but adopting a silhouette based on the F-14.  The canted winglets simply moved backwards onto the legs to become the tail to facilitate the adoption of the F-14's VG wing, and then inboard onto the beavertail when the "backpack" became a part of the design.

There was already plenty of precedent for "ruddervators" via designs like the Fouga CM.170 Magister and CM.175 Zephyr, so using that as a substitute for a horizontal stabilizer that would otherwise make the transformation messier was probably a desirable solution.

The transitional design between the Breast Fighter and the early F-14-based VF-1 drafts looks like it might have become an early version of the F203 Dragon II and MiM-31 Karyovin.

 

 

Sky Angels (1984) directly acknowledges (from an in-universe perspective) that the reason the VF-1 Valkyrie lacks a horizontal stabilizer is because the engineers who designed it had not been able to find a good way to securely store it when the Valkyrie transformed.  It goes on to explain that the aerodynamic issues caused by its removal are compensated for by the large vertical stabilizers, ventral fins, thrust-vectoring nozzles, and wingtip roll-control thrusters.

Variable Fighter Master File: VF-0 Phoenix (2012) explains the lack of horizontal stabilizers as a design concession to improve stealth performance.  It weaves an interesting narrative around the Grumman Super Tomcat-21 proposal, claiming that both the Grumman Super Tomcat-21 and McDonnell Douglas A-12 Avenger II programs were dummy projects which were used to camouflage appropriations for a top secret US Navy stealth fighter program codenamed "Shadow Cat" that was launched in the wake of the US Air Force's unveiling of the F-117 to other branches of the service and was cancelled in the 1990s before it could get past the mockup stage.  The idea was revived in 2001 as part of the restart of the F-14's production for the UN Forces because it shared 75% of its parts with the existing F-14 and a completed Shadow Cat was rolled out as the F-14++ Advanced Tomcat, which would be used as a starting point for developing a practical VF prototype due to its structural similarities to Stonewell Bellcom's E303 design proposal.

[Gerli]

Awesome! I was looking for a "simple" answerd but you wrote the entire Wikipedia page! Thanks man!

[Seto Kaiba]

3 hours ago, Gerli said:

Awesome! I was looking for a "simple" answerd but you wrote the entire Wikipedia page! Thanks man!

Glad you like it.

The reason I ended up going into so much detail is I really wanted to capture a proper explanation for why horizontal stabilizers don't seem to have ever been a part of the concept, from the first drafts in late '79 and early '80 clear to the finished product in '82, despite it being based on a real aircraft.  

(For a lot of its development, it was a VERY different aircraft that seems to owe a lot to the X-24B, Gundam's FF-X7 Core Fighter, and the G-Fighter.)

EDIT: In his designer's note book, Kawamori notes he was very fond of Thunderbird-2 and built in in papercraft as a kid... which is also, perhaps not coincidentally, a lifting-body design with an unconventional twin boom tail.

Edited yesterday at 02:08 AM by Seto Kaiba

[Gerli]

Another interestin question to ask is what comes first: the size of the Zentradi or the Size of the VF-1? Did Kawamori desing the VF-1 and then the alien race to fight those machines? Or was the opossite?

[Seto Kaiba]

2 hours ago, Gerli said:

Another interestin question to ask is what comes first: the size of the Zentradi or the Size of the VF-1? Did Kawamori desing the VF-1 and then the alien race to fight those machines? Or was the opossite?

So there's a bit of a story there too... but a shorter one.

Y'see, before Studio Nue was founded as Crystal Art Studio in 1972 its founders collaborated together in a science fiction doujinshi circle called SF Central Art and published a science fiction fanzine called Crystal and ran a monthly fan get-together called the Crystal Convention.  They continued to publish doujinshi under the SF Central Art name for years after they formed the company and began doing science fiction planning and illustrations professionally and Studio Nue employees were able to get involved in that in their spare time.  Shoji Kawamori attended the Crystal Convention as a student and got involved in SF Central Art around the time he joined Studio Nue in 1979 where he was involved in their newest publication GUNSIGHT, a Mobile Suit Gundam fanzine.  That project would ultimately be responsible for a LOT of the familiar lore and worldbuilding that now makes up the foundation of Gundam's Universal Century.

Despite being credited now as the founder of the Real Robot genre of mecha anime, Gundam at the time was still pretty much seen as a Super Robot anime because there were a lot of gaps in the original show's worldbuilding and technical setting.  SF Central Art's GUNSIGHT saw a lot of dedicated adult SF writers and artists put their heads together to come up with what they felt were plausible and cogent explanations for everything from what the colony drop actually did to Earth to why Mobile Suits exist and how a lot of the technology works (including how Minovsky particles function).  Shoji Kawamori was a part of this effort (and threw a nod to it into Macross with the Macross's bridge callsign being "Gunsight 1".  They took it from the realm of Super Robot unexplained science-is-magic to more of a hard sci-fi angle.  Kenichi Matsuzaki, a Studio Nue member who'd been a writer on Gundam, was able to organize this fan effort into the original official Gundam setting publication Gundam Century.  

 

One of the things that Kawamori et. al. were a bit bothered by when it came to Gundam's worldbuilding was that the series never really established the why of the story's iconic giant robots.  Other than "it's the space future", why are 18 meter giant robots the new standard of warfare?  Why 18 meters?  Why giant robots at all?  GUNSIGHT, and later its successor Gundam Century, had to figure all that out after the fact and explain what in-universe contrivances could make such a weapon practical.  There really wasn't any clear reason or justification for why a giant humanoid robot would exist AT ALL.

Spoiler

Of course, we know the real world reason is sponsor meddling.  Gundam's sponsor and toy partner Clover Co. Ltd. wanted robots in the story, and weren't satisfied with Studio Nue cofounder Haruka Takachiho's alternative suggestion of a 2.5m tall powered suit ala Starship Troopers.  Tomino et. al. simply reverted to using the scaling of what they felt was the most mainstream giant robot at the time: the 18 meter tall Mazinger Z.  

So when Shoji Kawamori was working on his own giant robot anime project at Studio Nue, he made a point of ensuring that he had a clear and cogent explanation for his show's setting containing giant robots built directly into its story.

That being that Humanity had developed giant robots in anticipation of possible hostilities with a race of similarly sized giant aliens.

Presumably the size was finessed a bit in development, but I'd expect they probably stuck to nice round numbers given that the Flight Suit was around 4m tall (twice human size) and the final result was 10m tall (five times human size).

Edited yesterday at 08:03 PM by Seto Kaiba

[sketchley]

7 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

So when Shoji Kawamori was working on his own giant robot anime project at Studio Nue, he made a point of ensuring that he had a clear and cogent explanation for his show's setting containing giant robots built directly into its story.

Tangentially, I think that what happened made a deep impression on Kawamori-san, as he continues to provide justifications for the existence of giant robots (or their continuing existence in the face of technological developments), à la the dancing Battroids at the start of Macross Delta.

[pengbuzz]

8 hours ago, sketchley said:

Tangentially, I think that what happened made a deep impression on Kawamori-san, as he continues to provide justifications for the existence of giant robots (or their continuing existence in the face of technological developments), à la the dancing Battroids at the start of Macross Delta.

My personal belief is that at some point, someone criticized having giant robots in anime series and it hit Kawamori-san badly (either Macross or something else he was working on). After that (one or perhaps multiple incidents), he began developing in-story reasons why they are necessary. JMO.

[Big s]

1 hour ago, pengbuzz said:

My personal belief is that at some point, someone criticized having giant robots in anime series and it hit Kawamori-san badly (either Macross or something else he was working on). After that (one or perhaps multiple incidents), he began developing in-story reasons why they are necessary. JMO.

Either that or it was a drunken Seinfeld moment. Whyyyyy are real robots sooo big? It’s not like they’re fighting kaijus or anything…..they’re not super robots anymore……🥴

personally I’ve always thought votoms were a rather perfect size. Not big enough to end up easy targets and just big enough to stomp a dude

[Sildani]

I remember watching the DVDs of Gasaraki many moons ago and in the extras the mechanical designers talked about how they had to justify there being mecha in the story, when on its face a mecha isn't a great weapons platform or military vehicle, as tanks are smaller, cheaper, and much easier to conceal; so they leaned hard into the Mecha's superior mobility and dexterity. They also made them able to be solo-piloted by having a dedicated computer and sensor system handle all the actual motion of the mecha, all the pilot has to do is point the thing in a direction and the mecha will go there adjusting its speed, balance, and gait automatically.

[Big s]

1 hour ago, Sildani said:

I remember watching the DVDs of Gasaraki many moons ago and in the extras the mechanical designers talked about how they had to justify there being mecha in the story, when on its face a mecha isn't a great weapons platform or military vehicle, as tanks are smaller, cheaper, and much easier to conceal; so they leaned hard into the Mecha's superior mobility and dexterity. They also made them able to be solo-piloted by having a dedicated computer and sensor system handle all the actual motion of the mecha, all the pilot has to do is point the thing in a direction and the mecha will go there adjusting its speed, balance, and gait automatically.

In reality, there’s really no need for a robot with legs in a combat situation, but they’re cool and have a certain feel of fantasy that draws their attention. That being said , there’s more maneuverable the mecha and smaller sizes would be far more believable.

give a low profile vehicle a fast enough turret with a strong enough weapon and even the gundam would be toast, but we like the idea that they can dodge better and and could even close the gap and go melee.

[Seto Kaiba]

15 hours ago, sketchley said:

Tangentially, I think that what happened made a deep impression on Kawamori-san, as he continues to provide justifications for the existence of giant robots (or their continuing existence in the face of technological developments), à la the dancing Battroids at the start of Macross Delta.

6 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

My personal belief is that at some point, someone criticized having giant robots in anime series and it hit Kawamori-san badly (either Macross or something else he was working on). After that (one or perhaps multiple incidents), he began developing in-story reasons why they are necessary. JMO.

TBH, I think that impression was probably made literal years before Kawamori actually began his career at Studio Nue.

After all, he started attending SF Central Art's monthly meet-up "The Crystal Convention" during his first year of high school in 1975.  SF Central Art got its start as a fan group for SF Magazine doing illustrations, analysis, and theory-crafting based on the magazine's publications of domestic and translated western sci-fi stories.  They turned that into a business in 1972 when they formed Crystal Art Studio (later Studio Nue) and were doing illustrations for translated western SF as well as developing setting materials and doing some outsource mechanical design for SF and mecha anime works.  He basically spent the last 3-4 years of his pre-professional life regularly hanging out with detail-obsessed SF design artists and illustrators whose passion and profession was analyzing and crafting highly detailed science fiction settings.

He joined Studio Nue the same month that Mobile Suit Gundam started airing (April 1979) and got wrapped up in SF Central Art's analysis and theory-crafting about that series that spawned GUNSIGHT and then Gundam Century while working on The Ultraman and Diaclone.  

I don't think any criticism of giant robots hit Kawamori badly.  He was already the kind of person who'd ponder the implications and ask probing questions about a SF setting and he had spent four years with pros learning how to build, analyze, and critique detailed sci-fi settings.  He was one of the ones making the criticism of giant robots while he was watching and discussing Gundam with the other members of SF Central Art and those criticisms and observations about how Gundam's story was put together informed his own work on what would become Super Dimension Fortress Macross.