Seto Kaiba

Interestingly, they have... One of the more unconventional ways the VF-27 exploited the atypically large generator surplus it had from four Stage II thermonuclear reaction turbine engines was using its energy conversion armor and pin-point barrier system in Fighter mode to allow it to briefly exceed the usual Mach 5+ heat resistance boundary and achieve Mach 9 at ~10km by beefing up the armor strength and using the pinpoint barrier to shield the fighter from as much air friction as possible. Unfortunately, that draws a lot of power and can only be done for short periods.

Submarines in general are not a tall gent's friend... I'm a bit under 2m, and let me tell you having to pretzel myself into the Gato-class USS Silversides was not a pleasant experience. I kind of expect the Nautilus to be roomier, since it isn't wasting huge amounts of space on lead acid battery stacks and diesel fuel tanks. The worst experience I ever had with cramped interior spaces was the lower level of the engine room on the Edson... if you want to maneuver safely in that space you'd better bloody well be boneless, two-dimensional, or a Smurf. Kind of makes you wonder what the conditions were like on the Spacy's Oberth-class missile destroyers, given that the Spacy was apparently recruiting experienced submariners to crew including Bruno J. Global, whose previous command was the submarine Marco Polo. More than that, aerodynamics are a common factor too... if you want to go insanely fast in atmospheric combat the way the Feios Valkyrie does, your aerodynamic options are VERY limited.

Museum ships, mind you... like the Forrest Sherman-class destroyers, Aggressive-class minesweepers, Gato-class submarines, and the Iowa and New York-class battleships. Nothing drives home the meaning of "cramped" and "space efficient" like the engine room on a Forrest Sherman-class ship. I've gotten to see a bit more than the average tourist by being a donor to a few different museum ships. Sometimes you get convergent design... like how the common principles of passive stealth have led to most independently-developed 5th Generation stealth fighters looking VERY similar.

Oh yes... I've been aboard a number of US Navy ships of various classes, and it's barely an exaggeration at all to say that space is micromanaged down to the inch. They have trained personnel to manage complex systems... they just don't know how to modify or repair their own technology. If you recall, one of the Zentradi who was involved in the mass defection right before the climax of the First Space War was an officer rated to operate the miclone system. It's not unreasonable that they could have personnel who were trained to operate those systems if they existed, the problem is that it's not an efficient use of shipboard space, resources, and manpower. (It also kind of assumes that you can very quickly defrost someone from cold sleep and have them ready to go into battle immediately, which is probably not possible.) Granted, though overtechnology has explicitly solved that problem... the Earth UN Forces and New UN Forces have included rudimentary cold sleep functions for life support on stranded fighters and mecha throughout the series timeline, though it's only mentioned on a few specific units like the SF-3A Lancer II space fighter and Queadluun-Rhea battle suit.

The ironic part being that, as beings of mental/spiritual energy, the Protodeviln are literally all soul. Warships in general carry few, if any, spare vehicles. Onboard storage is a precious commodity and reserved for essential consumables like fuel, food and water, medical supplies, ammunition, and other essentials. It's not surprising that the same would be true for the Zentradi, especially as their ships are spacegoing and have to also store various things a seagoing ship doesn't like breathing mixture. The Zentradi don't know how to repair things anyway, so storing mecha in a disassembled state would be a no-go. Storage for troops... that's called crew quarters. Most ships are going to be operating with more than they actually need as a basic safety measure in the event of accidents, combat losses, and the simple practicalities of rotating shifts so people can sleep, eat, etc. Given that the Fulbtzs Berrentzs-class mothership/fortress was basically a giant mobile fleet base and supply depot, it's a very safe bet that one of the supplies they stock for all the various sub-fleets that operate as part of the main fleet is replacement troops. Crew quarters and training facilities are pretty much a given. As for why they wouldn't have cloning facilities aboard... they have factory satellites for that specific purpose. Why send your cloning facilities into harm's way when you can keep your source of fresh troops well defended behind the lines and just send transports back and forth to order and retrieve newly-cloned fresh troops on an as-needed basis. It's not like cloning takes a very long time in Macross, so there's no need to build up large stockpiles of troops and then store them. It can function as a "just in time" production system... or as close to it as possible. I've never met anyone who did, mainly because it blatantly flies in the face of what's actually in the show. There's really not much said on the subject. Their biochemistry and anatomy were engineered to work around the problems caused by the square-cube law, but exactly how is not discussed beyond mentioning the structural strength of things like bones and connective tissue was enhanced. There are mentions of mental enhancements to Exsedol's archivist type, but again non-specific (basically just boosted memory?). G-force resistance isn't mentioned specifically for normal Zentradi since their mecha aren't very high-performance, but there are apparently certain anatomical limits that couldn't be overcome on that front, which led to the Protoculture developing a better class of pilot (the females/Meltrandi) for the Queadluun series battle suits and an inertia capacitor for that design to deal with the excessive g-force problem. I can see an obvious reason why you wouldn't. There's a limit to the number of troops a ship can actually utilize. Once every duty station is fully manned for all shifts that the ship's duty roster has and there are pilots for all of the mecha the ship can carry while also carrying enough supplies to sustain operations for the intended duration, any troops above and beyond that number are resources that can't be properly utilized. The Zentradi can't repair mecha or ships, and storing lots of replacement mecha would curtail the storage for consumables significantly. It's easier, faster, and more resource-efficient to equip ships with what they need and to simply rotate depleted units off the front lines for replenishment than provide ships with an excess of resources that could be lost in combat before they could be utilized. Very... but the heuristic engines these safety analysis programs use can sometimes produce funky results. I remember one point where Google's security metrics tool accidentally blacklisted some of its own products. I sent a correction notice to SafeWeb since I'm a trusted partner there.

Well, we know rank hath its privileges even among the Zentradi forces given that Vrlitwhai at one point mentions his quarters while the low ranking Zentradi are shown to share large communal bunkrooms. We also know via Quamzin and Oigul's introduction that Zentradi soldiers receive liquor rations for recreational use... and that those are sometimes abused, given that one of Exsedol's anecdotes about Quamzin's irresponsibility involves him having gotten drunk while on duty and causing havoc. (Substance abuse was also apparently an issue for Zentradi making the adjustment to Earth's culture, with some Zentradi like Roli Dosel becoming alcoholics.) Off-duty socialization seems to be a thing, and they do understand gambling at least since Quamzin and Oigul were betting on how many ships they'd collide with when they defolded too close to Vrlitwhai's forces. I'd expect there's probably a fair amount of time spend in drills or simulator exercises to keep their skills sharp.

Eh... in all fairness, I wouldn't call it "desperation". It's more like the showrunners have been forced to accept certain realities about the series. Namely, that absolutely bloody nobody is watching Star Trek: Picard for the new characters who were originally supposed to carry the series. Picard's showrunners had initially said they were keen to restrict guest appearances by returning TNG characters to the absolute minimum so the series could focus on its original characters. That theoretically admirable commitment to having the series stand on its own merits instead of a borrowed gloss from TNG seems to have fallen by the wayside after Star Trek: Discovery's first season flopped internationally and they decided to build season two around legacy characters. Picard's guest appearances by the only well-received parts of the series, even if fans hated how the series depicted everyone as beaten and broken failures, so they're going for broke by bringing both of Picard's most iconic villains (Q and the Borg Queen) back alongside the one trusted advisor who advised him about both: Guinan. They've accepted the series will never sell on its own merits, so they're going whole hog on borrowed appeal from TNG instead. (It's interesting to note that they seem to have been unable to secure the services of original Borg Queen actor Alice Krige or her mid-series Voyager stand-in Susanna Thompson to play the Borg Queen... she's being played by Annie Wersching this time around, who you may remember as Liana from ENT "Oasis".) Nah, this combo is clearly strategic: Q - Picard's first and most iconic recurring villain, who put all of humanity on trial with various temporal and alternate universe shenanigans and who introduced humanity to the Borg. The Borg Queen - the recurring villain who traumatized Picard the most, and who has history with Seven of Nine as well. Guinan - Picard's mysterious old friend and trusted advisor who has been hinted to have supernatural abilities including a demonstrated intuitive knowledge of changes to the timeline, who advised Picard on how to survive encounters with the Borg due to her own people having been destroyed by them, and who shares some mysterious and unelaborated-upon past with Q that was enough for Q to warn Picard about her and potentially even fear her.

Well, yes... deliberately so for illustrative purposes. Note that I said a ship with several times the size of the entire Japanese archipelago could easily be home to half a billion or more. That's a Palladium-ism. IIRC, we've talked on this point before about the Palladium Books Robotech and Macross II RPGs claiming that the Zentradi (and Mardook) kept all the rank-and-file Zentradi soldiers in cold sleep between combat operations and how it's not actually based on anything in the anime itself. Kevin Siembieda and co. have some very strange ideas about the Zentradi as a whole that are at odds with both Robotech and the original Macross, really. Like their oft-repeated claim that the vast majority of the Zentradi are practically unthinking organic robots with no capacity for more than the most basic social interaction. Or that the Zentradi are constantly high on combat drugs. Or that the Zentradi rank-and-file are only conscious for battle and spend the entire rest of their lives in cold sleep. All of which are at odds with the source material for their licensed game.

Nah, let's steal a march on Star Trek and Gundam... 1:1: scale Battle Frontier!

Where, exactly? (Not trying to be snarky, genuinely asking.) Star Trek: Picard's production quality was consistently high, as you'd expect from a series that sacrificed even episode count to keep its per-episode production budget up to the level the studio needed. Apart from a few minor prop and costume issues it was pretty as a picture. (Just not a picture from Star Trek, mind you.) The issues that got the series crucified by general audiences were in its writing. Eh... on the basis of the objective evidence, I'd have to disagree with that assessment unless your contention is that the "fan-rage faction" comprises the majority of the fanbase.

Because the guns on those escorts are nowhere near as big or as killy... they're probably about comparable to the larger turret-mounted guns of a Battle-class given their size. Not to mention a Battle-class's heavy quantum reaction cannon is an anti-fleet weapon, it has a LOT more firepower and the ability to kill whole squadrons of ships in a single shot... and the Battle-class also carries nearly a thousand Valkyries, potentially with thermonuclear reaction weaponry.

It is the only known example of a 4th Generation emigrant ship to date.

Huh, for some reason your site's getting tagged as Unsafe by various security software including Norton SafeWeb?

... you weren't kidding, that's an Unpopular Opinion.

's it just me or are those links not working? Is it that time of year already, @sketchley?

It is, in fact, a different Eden. Turns out the One Steve Limit isn't rigidly enforced when it comes to naming planets? Makes you wonder if there's an Eden 2 out there. I can see the emigration advert now: EDEN 2: EDEN HARDER

So... the Island Jackpot is a bit of a sticky wicket in and of itself. Despite being a reuse of the Macross Frontier series CG model for Island-1, albeit scaled down and with a new interior texture, it seems to have been intended as a stand-in for one of the very earliest City-class emigrant ships built before the armored "shell" was added to the design like those that accompanied the Macross 1 fleet. For what it's worth, the Macross 1 and Macross 2 are the only ones from that period not accounted for in terms of an established settlement. Macross 3 settled Eden 3 in 2040 before being forced to abandon it, Macross 4 settled Sephira, and we know Macross 5 was built with a shell and settled on Lux before being destroyed. The City-class, in all of its various permutations, was a 3rd Generation emigrant ship design. 1st Generation: Megaroad-class 2nd Generation: ? Possibly the converted Zentradi ships used in short-distance emigrant fleets 3rd Generation: City-class 4th Generation: Mainland-class? 5th Generation: Island Cluster-class

It's gonna be the hardest of all hard passes from me. Star Trek: Picard's season one was some real weak sh*t that absolutely stank of desperation and the most abject irrelevance. Its continuation is a monument to the Sunk Costs Fallacy, if nothing else. Its viewership numbers were trash on CBS All Access in the US and worse abroad. It was supposed to sell on the strengths of the new characters, but nobody liked or cared about Picard's pack of Kirkland brand Ethnic Supporting Characters™ and their respective incoherent paper-thin "tragic" backstories. So now ViacomCBS is selling off stock to pay for this sad mess and they still have to depend on TNG walk-ons to keep anyone watching. Someone needs to gently remove Sir Patrick (and everyone else, TBH) from the writer's room and make sure the doors are locked so he can't get back in.

Your mind's ear can really hear the hollow "thud" followed by the wet fingers-on-glass noise of him descending the side of the VF-19...

... OK, I have to admit you managed to actually stump me a good ten, maybe fifteen, minutes there. (Seriously, a full on "Perhaps the archives are incomplete" moment...) It's the designation that threw me. Until now, I'd never heard of a predecessor to the SF-3A Lancer II from Super Dimension Fortress Macross being mentioned. I'd only ever seen the one isolated mention of a successor craft (no art) designated SF-5X. Nor had I heard of an official setting design named "Hound Dog". So I was well and truly lost until it occurred to me that it might be one of the unused designs conceived during the development of the original series... and lo and behold, there it was in the bottom left corner of page 242 of Macross: Perfect Memory. It is named "Hound Dog" (ハウンド・ドーグ) but it's not designated SF-1. It's described as a "Stratosphere+Space Fighter" (成層圏+宇宙戦闘機), and it's noted that the design is a final draft that was not included in the main story.

Greetings! The highest-numbered emigrant fleet that has been mentioned as launching from Earth was the Macross 29 fleet... also known as the 59th Large-Scale Long-Distance Emigrant Fleet. It was the setting for the 2012 stage musical Macross the Musiculture. Prior to that, the highest-numbered emigrant fleet launched from Earth that we know about was the Macross 25 fleet, also known as Macross Frontier, or the 55th Large-Scale Long-Distance Emigrant Fleet. Of course, those fleets have been in space for decades by the time they appear in their respective stories, so there is almost certainly a much higher-numbered fleet from Earth that just hasn't appeared or been mentioned yet. The Macross 11 fleet's environment ship is said to be a transitional type between the 3rd Generation City-class and 5th Generation Island Cluster-class, though it is still technically a 3rd Generation emigrant ship. The Macross Galaxy fleet's Mainland is the only example we've seen of a 4th Generation emigrant ship, but it is also noted to be a very unconventional design because of Macross Galaxy's adoption of many radical new technologies and minimal interest in things like the comfort of its population. (It's kind of a cyberpunk dystopian city in space.) No problems there.

But that's only a rough-order estimate assuming a uniform distribution of personnel across all ship types in a Zentradi Main Fleet. That number is skewed pretty badly by the existence of the Mobile Fortress. A ship several times the size of the entire Japanese archipelago like the TV version Fulbtzs Berrentzs-class mothership likely has a gargantuan crew appropriate to its size. (Japan in 1982 was home to 118 million people, a ship several times its area could easily be home to half a billion or more.) Then, of course, the crew size is naturally going to vary by the size and role of the warship. The small 500m-class pickets are likely to have crews of a few dozen to a hundred or so based on their size in scale to their crews, and the larger warships are obviously going to have thousands. Macross Chronicle rolls with the assessment that Chlore's fleet is 500 times the size of the Macross 7 fleet, making it ~97,000 ships. She doesn't have a mobile fortress, and like most Zentradi forces and the Spacy itself a lot of her fleet's ships are picket ships. Odds are she actually has around half the number you computed based on the raw average, and probably less than that given that the females were elite forces with lower numbers than the males to begin with. Still a pretty substantial population, but not unmanageably so. Assuming they decide to settle on a world at all.

Even he's not THAT crazy... though those mad lads did rig zip lines all over the space between buildings where Basara usually parks it, so he ziplines down to it like a 60's superhero or something. (Which is almost exactly as dangerous, except you're trusting your grip strength instead of your aim.) They only use the winch thing like once or twice, and every other time they just put the Valkyrie in GERWALK mode with the nose to the ground and a hand out or have some other way to get into it like the Battroid being on its back. There's a whole bunch of scenes where they just don't show pilots embarking or disembarking to avoid having to work out how.

Variable Fighter Master File's volumes on the VF-1 offer some details about the Valkyrie's end-of-life with the New UN Forces after the First Space War. Both in terms of its service life extension upgrades (e.g. VF-1P, VF-1X) and what became of many of the VF-1 units that were not decommissioned and sold off to private buyers. Many, particularly a postwar model designated VF-1L, were converted into radio-controlled target aircraft for training exercises with live weaponry. The VF-1 Valkyrie has an embarkation ladder that collapses into the side of the cockpit in fighter mode. It's seen a bunch in the original series. The VF-19 is shown to have a winch with a foot stirrup and handgrip in Macross 7.

Probably purchased after the Destroids were decommissioned and sold off as potential industrial equipment as a museum piece. Eh... yes and no, but more no than yes. Many of the VF-1's seen in Macross 7 are supposedly units disarmed and sold off to civilians by the New UN Forces after the VF-1 was retired from service. Many more, according to Master File, met their end as target aircraft in training exercises with live weaponry. Past that point, most of the VF-1's we see in civilian hands are purpose-built civilian models which use more modern hardware and software.