Seto Kaiba

Well, in that case you may like Macross II: Lovers Again because it is really just more of that. In terms of themes, tone, and content it's easily the sequel closest to the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross and Macross: Do You Remember Love? movie. It's a very "safe" sequel that takes relatively few risks and doesn't do much to change up the established formula. It's very like a Gundam sequel in that regard. That lack of innovation is one of the main criticisms Macross fans level at the OVA. The setting hasn't really changed substantially despite 80 years of in-universe time passing. The mechanical designs are, in large part, 90's updated versions of the original designs instead of anything really new or radically different. Well, like I mentioned above it's a very "safe" sequel that's not really taking many risks with its story. It still has the same themes about idols and song as a form of communication, but mixed in with a plot heavily inspired by Roman Holiday and some new themes about nationalism, xenophobia, and journalistic integrity. The one area where it really diverges from the established formula is that its protagonist is a civilian journalist rather than a soldier, which lets the story go in some new directions. I think most fans would agree that it's merely "pretty good" where most other Macross titles are usually "great". Partly because 6 OVA episodes isn't really enough time to fully develop every character, so the love triangle can feel a bit one-sided. It is the title that hews most closely to the original form of the Macross formula, so if that's what you're after you'll probably enjoy it.

I guess now that Gainax is no more, Anno and Khara have arrived at the realization they have to actually do work. 😅 This May is Khara's 20th anniversary and their filmography's so thin it makes you wonder what they've been doing all that time. This new Evangelion series is only their second actual TV series project in that entire time. Their total non-Evangelion animation output in 20 years amounts to one movie (Mary and the Witch's Flower), 12 TV episodes (GQuuuuuuX), two 45 minute specials (The Dragon Dentist), a 20 minute video game promo (Gravity Rush), and about three-dozen shorts with ~6 minute average runtime.

Sitting down to watch this week's new episode... Ko'Zeine. Honestly, the episode title sounds like a sleep aid. (Not even being sarcastic there, and I work for a company where like 2/3 of the staff have made the joke that our company name ALSO sounds like a medication.) So apparently this one's premise is that the students go home to see family during what we're not going to call Spring Break but is definitely Spring Break? I guess we can't show the cadets going to Cancun (or Risa?) for Spring Break because it would be weird and out-of-place for them to be horny on main like they've been for the last six episodes right after that disastrous training exercise that got so many people killed. Of course, it also bears recognizing that Nahla Ake has been Chancellor of Starfleet Academy's Earth campus for a single semester and she's done such a rubbish job of it that there's now a death toll directly attributable to her irresponsible conduct. Honestly, the acknowledgement that the events of the previous episode were capital T "Traumatic" for the cadets and that they're still processing it even with the help of therapy is a rare thing for Star Trek and shows the writers are thinking. "You've got four pairs of boots in here! You don't even wear shoes!" - my candidate for line of the episode. "SUNSET MOON" is certainly a choice of caption. It makes no sense, even as a placename. "The Khionian Realm" isn't much more helpful. It's another planet subjected to the Piss Filter, because that's how you know you're outdoors... the sky looks like you're viewing it through a yard of cheap pilsner. The fan phrase "Dadmiral" has now graduated to an official part of the Star Trek lexicon after being used to refer to Admirals Paris and Mariner. Maybe the reason Darem's so worried is because all the decor on this moon seems to be shaped like a buttplug. The director's foot fetish is back. This time it's Reno's feet being jammed into the camera. Seriously. I am SO close to calling an exorcist to remove the vengeful spirit of Quentin Tarantino from the studio. Honestly, not a bad episode at all. This series seems to do character writing much better than it does anything to do with space adventure. Another licensed song over the credits this time... "We watch the stars" by Fink. Pretty much, yeah. Starfleet Academy's main problem is that the writing is horribly uneven. When the series wants to do character-focused drama, they actually do a pretty passable job at it. Some of the episodes (e.g. Kraag's focus episode) are almost worthy of the title of Star Trek and could be made quite good with only a few tweaks. But both times the series has tried to do Space Adventure in a vein similar to past Star Trek titles, the bottom has fallen out quality-wise and they've served up some Discovery-tier idiot plots. A secondary problem is that the show's writers want to do humor, but the kind of humor they want to do doesn't seem to be something they know how to integrate into the story organically. So the attempts at humor are very forced and unnatural and you can practically see the writer's wild-eyed desperation and unspoken plea of "Please laugh". Colbert's involvement is purely "humorous" in the sense that he seems to exist in the story purely to serve up "funny" non-sequiturs that aren't actually funny in-context or out. Many of the non-sequiturs involving one particular science officer's badly-behaved pet. (Why this needs to be announced over the tannoy instead of being called in to that officer directly is anyone's guess.)

Holodeck malfunctions, at least, don't require the crew to go and waste time making expensive, idiotic, and entirely unnecessary concessions to a bloodthirsty space pirate to resolve. When the safeties do go out, the program still doesn't go off the rails. The only hazards that exist are those that were already native to the program and simply being NERF'd by the holodeck safeties. Simulating the Miyazaki salvage operation would not have put the cadets in danger of being violently murdered by space pirates unless someone had deliberately programmed in a group of murderously violent space pirates. Otherwise, the only safety risks might be asphyxiating in the event of a hull breach or injury in the event that they had one of Star Trek's trademark exploding consoles. (If you didn't want the students to know they were in a simulation, all you'd need to do is beam them into the simulator from the ship.) "Come, Let's Away" was the story of a completely preventable disaster that resulted in the deaths of a cadet, an Academy instructor, and an unknown but implicitly large number of other Starfleet personnel aboard the USS Sargasso and Starbase J19-Alpha because the Academy chancellors decided to do this training exercise for their first year cadets in the most irresponsible and unsafe manner imaginable. Not only in uncontrolled conditions aboard a derelict ship, but in unsecured contested space no less.

There are two right on the front page... one of which is someone else asking basically the same question.😅 Well, without knowing you it's kind of hard to answer an open-ended question like that. Personally, I would say that Macross II: Lovers Again is just as worthy of your time as any other Macross title. It was kind of the odd man among Macross sequels (at least prior to Delta) in that it didn't take a radically new approach to the setting. It's a fairly safe, conventional sequel that builds on what came before but takes no major risks with it. It presents a rather different view of Macross's future than the sequels that came after, built exclusively on DYRL?.

Oh yes, that's Variable Fighter VF-1 Valkyrie Vol.1 page 78. There's a blocked-off section on that page that talks about how OTM-based threaded fasteners work and how the Human engineers from OTEC were flummoxed by what the Protoculture had done with a concept as simple as threaded fasteners. Their analysis found two revolutionary concepts: The bolts/screws they studied were machined with zero fit, meaning they were machined so precisely that there were absolutely no gap of any kind between the root and thread of the screw and the socket they engage with. The surface of the bolts/screws and sockets were treated with molecule-thin layers of two different compounds that contact bond to each other via intermolecular forces and secure the bolt/screw in the socket until a certain amount of torque is applied at which point the bolt/screw turns freely (but which will re-bond cleanly once torque is no longer being applied). You've probably seen videos like the below showing off near-zero tolerance machining... but zero fit machining is even more precise than that. The molecular coating is a bit harder. In principle it's a bit like loctite, but somehow built into the screw/bolt and socket respectively and infinitely rebondable. Something like that is a bit beyond our modern technology and would definitely provide a more secure fit than anything we can currently achieve.

There's a pretty good reason given directly in the episode for why they wouldn't be able to send holograms over... the Miyazaki had no power, so the holoemitters that have lined the corridors of ships for emergency hologram use since VOY "Message in a Bottle" wouldn't be operational. (SAM presumably has something like Arnold Rimmer's light bee keeping her program going?) The idiot ball moment is more "Why was it necessary to go to contested space and put the first-year cadets in actual danger when they could have just as easily simulated this using a training ship or just a regular holodeck where they would not be in any danger of being murdered by space pirates?" We know Starfleet Academy has had simulator training since before the holodeck was even a thing... the infamous Kobayashi Maru test that Kirk infamously cheated was one.

... ... ... sh*t, that's a really good point. Why wasn't this training exercise carried out on a holodeck?

A little bit of Google-fu suggests that The Mandalorian's third season, Ahsoka, and Skeleton Crew all happened roughly concurrently in 9 ABY. They're probably still trapped in that other galaxy.

Maybe it's something like Discovery did with the Breen, where the Human-like face is their original/normal one and their more exotic and alien-looking appearance is something they regard as special or private or something they only adopt situationally.

Remember that time Captain Kirk literally advocated for the literal devil? Fun times... and a much better episode than anything Starfleet Academy has brought to the table despite being cornier than a state fair. That's not a sonic weapon then, that's a gravimetric one that produces sound as a secondary effect. Oh, yes... the novel Forgotten History. Weird story, that one. Equal parts fix fic for a bunch of old TOS episodes like "Miri" and "The Omega Glory" and attempt to un-noodle the DS9-era DTI's noodle incident-induced loathing for James T. Kirk and his promotion to Admiral between TAS and the first movie. The life support belt - and personal forcefields in general - was a really short-lived concept from TAS. Same as a bunch of other actually pretty useful ideas like having automated defenses against being boarded. It's part of why I'm so very amused to see the humble life support belt back on top after a whopping 926 years.

When it comes to unnecessary and plot-derailing callbacks, continuity nods, crossovers, and cameos from Darth Filoni, you'd better believe that...

All right, we had a new episode of Star Trek: Star Feet Academy last Thursday and I'm only just now getting around to it... "Come, Let's Away" So... that's new. A photosensitivity warning due to some scenes having strobing effects. The writers invoke their inner Roddenberry by reminding us that Deltans hat is being from F**k Planet for the first time since Star Trek: Enterprise. That was a creepy bit of lore by old man Gene that I think would probably have been best left forgotten, but here we are. It's still weird hearing licensed music in Star Trek too. This whole opening has "UFO" by Olivia Dean as BGM. So Starfleet Academy and the War College are on joint exercises together aboard the Athena. Honestly, while I am gradually warming towards this series the Athena is still emblematic of how the 32nd century Starfleet ships are irredeemably fugly. Also, these cadets have been in their respective service academies for only a few weeks. They're already doing field training? And in a starship graveyard, no less. Maybe start the kids who've been in the service for only a few weeks on something a little simpler like, y'know, routine shipboard duty? Then again, these kids never seem to actually go the **** to class... so they're even less prepared than they ought to be. Seems like the showrunners spent so much money on extras in heavy prosthetic makeup, licensed music, and unnecessary CG for things like Reymi's face that they couldn't afford actual spacesuits for the characters away mission. But since everything old is new again, I'd like to bid a fond "Welcome back" to the Starfleet Life Support Belt from Star Trek: the Animated Series (1973). "Starfleet's newest plasma-based life support system" is tech from 2269 that somehow manages to look worse in this $8M+ per episode streaming series than it did in Filmation's 1973 hand-drawn animation produced on a budget of two Cheerios box tops and whatever change Gene had in his sofa cushions at the time. Come on Starfleet Academy, you were doing so... almost not terrible... up to now. One little bit of space adventure and you fall back onto an idiot plot immediately? Also, why are there so many hybrid aliens now? They can't be arsed to say what species the Furies are, but they're half-Human half-something. Honestly, the fact that Captain Ake is the one who points out what a stupid idea this entire plot is is very much in "the worst person you know just made a great point" territory. Why is being thrown out the airlock even an issue? All of you are wearing personal life support force fields. If those things can't activate automatically when they sense a vacuum the way the 23rd century equivalent could, then they're actually less useful than a regular spacesuit. There is practically nothing stopping them from deliberately spacing themselves and just floating home. Paul Giamatti's performance here is so detestably awful that I very nearly gave up and turned the episode off. This is a line of actual dialog delivered by him in this episode: Someone wrote that. Likely workshopped that for days if not weeks through table reads and rehearsals. And said, with the gleeful ten-thumbed incompetence of the very meanest Pakled, "Yeah, that's good enough dialog for Star Trek." To this episode's writers, Kenneth Lin and Kiley Rosseter, I will say only that I hope you stub your smallest toe on the corner of every piece of furniture in your respective homes at least once a day for the rest of your miserable lives you absolute hacks. Much of the rest of his dialog is similar in content and delivery. That Mr. Giamatti apparently did not look at this script and immediately turn to the writers and say "What the f*** is wrong with you?" is a true black mark on his professional comportment as an actor. To make a dumb character dumber, one thing we learn about Nus Braka in this episode is that his character has cut a game of tic-tac-toe into his own hair on the right side of his head. A game that was apparently played by someone VERY bad at tic-tac-toe. Say it with me now: Space is a vaccum and sound waves do not travel through a vacuum. A sonic weapon on a spaceship is fundamentally useless. I have an actual headache from watching this. Like, an actual migraine headache forming from watching this. Medication is required. Whether that'll be alcohol or just advil I have not decided.

Favreau and Filoni turned season 3 into an open-air dumpster fire by indulging in Filoni's favorite obsession with The Lore. You'd best believe that's what you're in for more of, now that Filoni's slipped the leash.

It's got the same writing team as S3... it can absolutely be worse.😜

Eh... I'm definitely going to wait 'til this one hits streaming to see it. The trailer doesn't look bad visually, but it does reinforce the idea that this is very much a Dave Filoni project and will be overrun with mindless fanservice in the form of callbacks, continuity nods, crossovers, and cameos. The two minutes we've got have at least six obvious ones. Somehow, making Mando a direct stakeholder in the New Republic's inevitable fall-due-to-incompetence feels like A Very Bad Idea.

Ah, no... unfortunately it seems you are misinterpreting what I am describing. Probaby because I'm not doing a very good job of describing the mechanism at work here. 🤔 The way ISC is described, it seems to work a bit like Star Trek's mass-lowering subspace fields used in its impulse and warp drives, just in reverse. Instead of bending space around the field source to move a discrete bubble of space through space it's bending space to temporarily "pocket" an inertial force above a certain set limit and then return that inertial load to the vehicle in a controlled manner. The way it works is essentially predictive, under the direction of the ARIEL II integrated control AI, which anticipates what maneuvers on the mecha's part will induce loads above the limit and activates the ISC appropriately to compensate for forces above the limit. Whether the field is limited to just the cockpit or is centered on the cockpit and distributed across the frame at a lower level varies between sources, but it's never described as offering any protection against an externally-imposed force like a collision or weapon strike. Much like how a ship in Star Trek can accelerate to relativistic speed without any inertial consequences using a subspace field but will shake violently or be forced into a spin from outside forces in the form of phaser/torpedo strikes. It only seems to shield the craft against inertial forces internal to the field's frame of reference (acceleration/deceleration of the craft itself). The VF-31's application of the technology is even expressly indicated to have actually made mechanical stresses worse by changing how the inertial forces were returned to the airframe. Based on what we know, I don't think it can do what you're envisioning... though honestly, a pinpoint barrier could already do much of that with much less cost and complexity as that operates by creating an artificial dimensional fault as a literal immovable object. Eh... yeah, given what we've got on the subject of space pirates and similar in existing Macross materials that's pretty much guaranteed suicide. Macross Dynamite 7's galactic whale poachers, Fasces's "recruitment" teams in Macross the Ride, and Gunness Mordler's bandits in Macross 30 are all united by one thing: having a substantial amount of black market military hardware at their disposal. They're not coming at a civilian freighter in spacesuits and waving cutlasses. They're coming with Valkyries, with civilian ships retrofitted to carry military-grade weapons, or even the occasional stolen or salvaged warship. Even the least threatening of those three examples - the poacher group - was showing up with at least a squadron's worth of fully-armed black market VA-3s, multiple auxiliary ships armed with military-grade laser weapons, and had just bought several VF-17s and a tactical thermonuclear reaction warhead. A Destroid waving a sharp bit of metal around is just going to get Temple of Doom'd with a rotary cannon or laser machinegun... likely before it ever gets close enough to do any damage. It's bringing a knife to a three-dimensional gunfight against gunmen who can fly and attack indirectly with guided missiles. It's also probably worth noting that the ship's crew doesn't have to be kept alive to take the cargo... they can shoot the ship full of holes and then send Valkyries over to collect the cargo once the crew have all asphyxiated. Fasces is the only one of the three with a vested interest in not killing, and that was because they were taking prisoners to "recruit" them into their organization via mind control. (This is, in short, why SMS was founded. Its parent company Bilra Transport is an interstellar cargo service that needed to be able to protect its shipments in transit and formed a private army because that was what was necessary to get the job done.) That's coming along really well. It looks great.

I'm not sure the ISC can do that. Its description is vague at best, but it seems to mostly be warping certain dimensions of space around the Valkyrie to displace inertial forces for a short time, but it doesn't seem to offer any protection against bullets, missile warheads, beams, etc. Bending time is possible with fold mechanics, but it's not something humanity has experimented with (as far as we know) with the only known example being something that was quickly judged far too dangerous to be allowed to exist. (The Fold Evil that the Protoculture buried on Uroboros in Macross 30.) If it's projectile and impact resistance you're after, the barrier alone would do the job with a lot lower costs since you're shielding the mecha with a portable singularity. Eh... I dunno. The idea of bringing a sword to a long-ranged particle beam cannon and guided missile fight just feels like it's destined to end one very specific way: Or if you prefer the robot version: After all, most Zentradi pods don't even have limbs appropriate to hand-to-hand combat. They're likely to have the same reaction Indy did. ... if gigawatt heavy metal charged particle beams, hypersonic armor-piercing explosive rounds, and high-yield missiles with OTM-enhanced Munroe effect warheads won't cut it against said giant space monsters, why would a sword? The kinetic energy of even a scaled-up buster sword won't really compare to those other weapons. Scaling from the very heaviest buster sword replica ever made (a whopping 123lb) and an expert swordsman's swing, we're still only looking at about 35MJ of energy in a REALLY hard and fast swing from that sucker. That's several times what the lightest beam weapons in the setting can put out, but at least a full order of magnitude short of the stopping power of gunpods and so on.

This got my scratching my head and sent me to the books... because I have no idea if an ISC can even be made to work that way. Normally, it's warping space to temporarily displace inertial forces before returning them to the frame in a controlled manner but the field is at least technically stationary WRT the movement of the vehicle itself. I'm not sure it would work on something passing through the field since the ISC doesn't offer any protection against bullets normally. (Now, I can think of a way to do this kind of thing... but you'd want the VF-22's Inertia Vector Control System instead. That magnifies or shrinks inertia vectors, but cannot change their direction. Using that, you could theoretically boost the acceleration of a Destroid to the point of turning a running punch into a guillotine, as long as you had a barrier to cushion that impact on the arm.) Wheeled bots DO spin and twirl. Hayate was doing exactly that at the start of Macross Delta, to the point that Freyja nearly lost her lunch. 😅 They just don't normally spin and twirl, because they're usually equipped for high-precision shooting. That said, I don't think "carrier deck brawls" are really a thing anymore after the First Space War. The only reason the Zentradi tried to board the Macross during the First Space War was that they had no idea what was going on with it or its crew due to the frankly insane circumstances of that first contact event. Their normal approach with an enemy warship is to just destroy it. New UN Forces warships developed after the First Space War generally aren't large enough to be home to a Destroid force either, with the exception of those 12 mass-produced Macross-class ships and the smaller Macross-type warships like the Elysion-type and Quarter-type that have a small number in external bunkers. Ideally, in a melee situation, you want something you can attack and block quickly with and quickly change direction with in a pinch. A weapon like a buster sword with huge mass requires a huge windup, a lot of recovery time between swings, and can't be maneuvered quickly. It's an invitation to getting shot fifty times while setting up your swing. (Though that's generally true for bringing a knife/sword to a gunfight in general and likely why the Spartan was seemingly the first/only Destroid role to be totally retired.)

IMO, there's a lot to be said for multi-purposefulness when it comes to applying mecha to mundane situations. There will always be situations where you absolutely need a dedicated tool for a specific job, but there are a LOT of situations where "good enough" is good enough and versatility is going to pay more dividends than being highly specialized. A handyman's stock in trade, as it were. If you can make a robot that's as dexterous and precise as a human without all those pesky biological limits on things like range of motion, stamina, etc. you can apply it to a LOT. Unless the structure is sturdy enough that it can maglock itself to the walls/girders and wheel right up the sides the way it would the outside of a ship. Lookin' sharp. Orange was definitely the right call for this one too. Imagine how painful it'd be to look at in hi-vis safety yellow.

Looks pretty good for a first try. Given what they're used for, honestly the more dinged-up the better IMO. Frontier's Destroid Works and Delta's Workroid probably find a lot more use than the military version. After all, this is basically a cheap piece of multipurpose heavy machinery that can be used for all different kinds of heavy work with modular parts or handheld equipment. We know from the Macross Frontier TV series and movies that they're used for disaster recovery and cleanup, firefighting, construction, and even mining. They're spaceworthy and the rollers they have on their feet can be magnetized, so they can be used for repairing ships and space stations from the outside. The Workroid version is shown to be the world's most OP freight handling machine, able to manhandle multiple 20ft-class ISO storage containers at one time exponentially faster than any crane... Mining, construction, and demolition is already a pretty huge portfolio for a single multirole machine. It's basically the equivalent of a Zentradi skilled tradesman without the resource issues of sustaining a population of giants.

That, of course, being the question that hangs over the Cheyenne II's entire existence. "Aside from jobbing, why are you even here?" Macross Frontier materials tell us that the Frontier fleet chose the Cheyenne II for a very specific corner case... air defense inside of the Island ships where the regular air defenses can't reach. This is seemingly only a concern because the Island Cluster-class emigrant ships are SO HUGE that enemies flying inside the dome without being forced into a virtual trench run by skyscrapers is a realistic concern. Why they didn't use a more conventional self-propelled anti-aircraft platform like Japan's Type-87 SPAAG is anyone's guess, esp. given that their other defenses include conventional tank destroyers (based on the B1 Centauro). (The real-world answer being a cost-save by reusing an existing CG model leftover from Macross Zero.) Because it's based on the same technology, and has the same basic limitations, as real-world anti-aircraft weapons. Of course, AI is not magic. What you get out of it is only as good as what you put into it and AI technology in Macross is limited by hardware and by law. As far as we know, the CIWS systems in Macross are very much like the ones in the real world just with better/more powerful missiles and with particle beam weapons in place of high rate-of-fire solid ammo cannons. They're using radar and other sensors to identify and track targets, feeding that data to onboard computers to predict trajectories to gain a missile lock or calculate lead time for a gun firing solution. Much like modern equivalents, these systems can be confused or outright defeated by stealth, speed, or simply flying erratically. VFs use a mixture of passive and active stealth measures to diminish the ability of enemy radar to detect them. This makes it harder for defenses to spot and engage them at range since it takes powerful ECCM to cut through active stealth. Red raw speed is an option to defeat many types of tracking systems. Even though it is normally easy to shoot down a target that is moving in a straight line, you need at least two data points about its location over time to compute an estimated trajectory and speed and plot an intercept based on that. If the craft or projectile is clear of the sensor's FOV before that second sweep needed to establish speed and directionality, the system cannot track the target and usually writes it off as a false detection. This was the cause of the 1991 Dhahran barracks disaster during the Gulf War (due to a software bug in Patriot missile systems providing air defense) and is also the working theory behind "uninterceptable" hypersonic missiles that have been talked about in the last few years. Flying erratically can also make interception more difficult by making it harder to establish a viable firing solution by simply being difficult to predict. VFs are quite good at this since they can turn on a proverbial dime by transforming and the ones we see doing most of the AA-dodging are 5th Gen ones that can accelerate and turn beyond the limits of what a human pilot could normally endure thanks to the ISC (Vajra flight performance is as good or even better). This was one reason that Iraqi scud missiles got through air defenses unusually often. Modifications made to increase their range made their flight paths erratic and reduced their accuracy, sometimes causing them to tumble or corkscrew through the air. Combine those as most VFs do, and a kill shot with anti-aircraft guns and missile launchers is far from guaranteed... which is why AA guns need to improve alongside the aircraft themselves. Even modern AA guns need to put hundreds of rounds in the air (often from multiple guns) for the chance of connecting with just a few of them to score a kill. Destroid weapon systems work exactly the same way, they're just mounted on a more expensive self-propelled platform. The center of that particular Venn diagram being that we are told that quite a few of those Cheyenne II's, particularly the ones used on ships like the Macross Quarter, aren't even manned. They're remotely operated, making them just an overpriced regular AA gun. From what we're told, modern AA systems c.2058-2059 are mainly designed to counter 4th Gen VF levels of performance and need an update to be able to address the greater performance of a 5th Gen VF or something like a Vajra reliably. We do see the Frontier fleet's air defenses scoring kills on Vajra at several points in the series, but that's likely as much down to a dense field of overlapping fire as skill or good judgement.

It's more than that. It's that the setting itself is designed in such a way that Destroids are not, and never will be, relevant. They are land warfare weapons in a setting where there's not really any land warfare going on. If you have to radically change the rules of your entire setting in order to make something viable in context, you're better off just making a new setting. You've demonstrated that you understand this principle through your example of Muv-Luv and how that setting explains the absence of fighter jets as a central part of its premise. What's your pitching here is essentially the same thing as reintroducing fighter jets to that setting. If they were practical, sure. The main problem with this logic being that advancing a useless weapon offers no real benefit. Yeah I can absolutely make a better sword out of unobtanium, but it doesn't do me any good if the enemy will shoot me dead from a kilometer away. The Destroids all have essentially the same problem. No matter how much you improve their systems, it won't make them useful because the problem isn't their performance. It's that they are designed for a type of combat which is fundamentally obsolete in the setting. Macross Galaxy actually tried modernizing Destroids using VF tech in Macross the Ride and the end result was that it didn't really help. Those improved destroids fared no better because they were ultimately stuck hanging around on the hull of a ship in purely defensive roles waiting for the enemy to come into range. They had no way to take the fight to the enemy, meaning they offered no material advantage over just having beam CIWS systems and missile phalanxes that could do the same job for less money and without the need to put a human operator at risk. Which does them no good because, again, they can't go on the offensive. That would actually offer no benefit at all. Because, as a ground weapon, they're pretty well below the minimum altitude for radar. They have no need of active stealth. (Putting aside the fact that even on a Valkyrie active stealth is basically ineffective in Battroid mode, since it depends on the passive stealthiness of the fighter mode, so it wouldn't really work on a destroid anyway.) There really isn't much in the way of "BS fold magic" going on outside of the YF-29. It's all pretty well within the realm of science. I'm not sure what the benefit of staying still extra hard would be when the fundamental problem is that they literally can't get into the same ZIP code with the enemy 99% of the time. But what are they shooting at? In this setting, a ground-based weapon is fundamentally sitting out of the fight because the fight is going on in deep space or in orbit. It's not shoot and scoot if you're never close enough to the enemy to do any shooting. Considering the orbital bombardment is carried out on the strategic scale, you can't even say you're providing the gunners a moving target. Macross doesn't usually go in for genocide, so you've already thematically left the ballpark right at the start. Might as well just make that a new setting for a different franchise.

Really? The official writeup of the Destroid Works is very blunt that it's literally just a Cheyenne II that's been stripped of its military hardware and given a coat of hi-viz orange paint. The Cheyenne II is a barely-there presence in Macross Frontier and Macross Delta because Destroids in general are pretty useless in a post-First Space War world. Destroids as a whole were designed around the idea of fighting a land war in a conventional alien invasion scenario. Something that just does not happen in Macross. They're land warfare weapons in a space war setting. Making it transform would defeat the other key attribute of a Destroid... being cheaper than a Valkyrie so that they can be fielded in larger numbers. Not that a transforming tank would be any less useless in a space war than a regular non-transforming ground-bound robot. The main reason the Frontier fleet uses them is because they wanted mobile AA defenses they could deploy inside the dome. Outside the dome is protected by more cost-effective static beam CIWS and missile phalanx systems. So... that's not quite how it works. Let me explain. It's not as simple as just "Destroids don't need to split power so they should be a lot tougher." You're assuming that all things are equal, and they're not. Valkyries are aircraft as much as they are giant robots. Their armor has to be kept thin and lightweight in order to preserve their flight performance and leave room for the internally carried fuel and other vital stores and systems. As such, they have to rely on more advanced and expensive composite armor reinforced by energy conversion armor driven by their pair of high-output thermonuclear reactors to achieve the required defensive performance. Those reactors HAVE to be high-output in order to meet the needs of the various other energy-hungry systems on a Valkyrie too, like thrust generation and active stealth, which makes them incredibly expensive. Destroids are walking AFVs and artillery built for land and surface warfare. They don't need to fly, and that means they don't need to make the same design compromises that the Valkyries did. They can achieve the required defensive performance by just having thicker composite armor. Not needing to provide plasma for thrust production or feed energy-intensive systems like active stealth and energy conversion armor means they can get by with a single, much cheaper and lower-output reactor instead of a pair of expensive high-end thermonuclear reaction turbine engines. At the end of the day, this makes them much cheaper than a Valkyrie. The early Destroids were about 1/20th the cost of a VF-1 back before the First Space War. Of course, this also means they don't have tons of extra power to throw around because their systems are tailored to their needs not the far greater needs of a Valkyrie. Because Destroids are inherently groundbound in a world where most combat is in the aerospace domain, keeping Destroids as cheap as possible is the only thing keeping them going as a supplement to even less expensive conventional anti-aircraft defenses like beam CIWS guns and missile phalanxes. If you were to give a destroid all the same tech as a Valkyrie, you'd have just made a Valkyrie mode-locked in Battroid mode and gotten rid of most of the cost advantage.

I'd assume so. Either that or he's just been given a massive amount of computer memory in order to continue functioning without running out of space like he did in Voyager. IMO, one of the weirder aspects of NuTrek's 31st/32nd Century setting is how the writers lack of respect for continuity has led to Federation technology either not advancing at all in 800 years or actually regressing in many areas for no clear reason.