Seto Kaiba

Says a lot about the movie that I legitimately couldn't remember and had to look it up. Both Hayate and Mirage were shot down in the dogfight on Al Shahal midway into the movie, but it's never made clear if their respective VF-31 Siegfrieds were destroyed or simply disabled. Hayate's VF-31 is shown crashing at a relatively low airspeed and should be basically intact. However, sloppy editing later in the film implies that Hayate had ejected from his VF-31 and that it exploded in midair due to having reused the scene from Macross Delta Ep13 where Hayate's VF-31 was incinerated by the detonation of a reaction weapon the NUNS used to try to destroy the Protoculture ruins on Ragna. Looking back at it, it's actually pretty weird that the Aerial Knights only recovered one of the three downed Siegfrieds for study. None of them were heavily damaged, but for some reason they only recovered Messer's which was missing its ordnance container and apparently ignored the other two? During their escape, Hayate took Messer's VF-31 and Mirage made do with a Sv-262Ba Draken III after changing its transponder codes. EDIT: Actually, it's even weirder if you think about it... Hayate and Mirage stole two fighters from the hangar of an Aerial Knights warship WHILE THE SHIP WAS AT BATTLE STATIONS. What's more, NOBODY noticed. That's a level of failing a spot check above and beyond even the worst blunders of the Imperial Stormtroopers in Star Wars.

@azrael? Can you give us a bit more to go on? Like what was the approximate vintage of this particular anime? Was it all 80's stuff? A mix of 80's and early 90's?

It's almost certainly another Xaos Valkyrie Works custom job, so whatever variant letter it's given is unofficial and for Xaos's internal convenience only... same as the VF-31C, E, F, J, and S. I'm wondering if they'll still call it a Siegfried, or if they'll pick another name for it since it's a different custom spec.

It's all about carrying on with the gimmick Hayate introduced with Messer's VF-31 Custom in the first movie... where he mounted Lilldrakens like that. It's a poor man's Tornado Pack.

For those looking to compare it to the VF-31A it so closely resembles, I made this real quick.

For those looking to visually compare like to like, I hastily slapped this together in MS Paint. I've also done an analysis on the Mecha thread in Series and Stories.

Does he have any without the reflected light from overhead lightning blurring the text? Sorry for the potato quality, I hacked the below image together real quick from the above and some published VF-31A line art from an old pamplet that did the rounds around the time the Macross Delta TV series first premiered. Had to do it in MS Paint since I'm on my work computer and don't have access to Photoshop. So... it's another custom VF-31 that more closely follows the design of the VF-31A? All in all, I am unimpressed. If I didn't know better, I'd have dismissed this as someone's fan art or a rejected Master File design rather than promotional material. The differences from the stock VF-31A Kairos don't seem to be very significant either. The canopy now tapers to a point on the nose and the sensors there have been rearranged to accommodate it. The canards have been redesigned slightly, and the winglets of the double delta wing have been stretched forward a little bit to more closely resemble those from the Sv-262Hs Draken III command spec. The mounts for the fold carbon/fold quartz inserts have been redesigned a bit too. The only other noteworthy changes are the railguns on the VF-31's forearms have been enlarged significantly to almost gunpod size, the beam gunpod itself has also been enlarged, and the ordnance container has grown a spike with no immediately evident purpose. It looks like it's largely unmodified, otherwise. All the existing design features of the VF-31A are still present, including all of the weapons systems barring the enlarged railguns and larger gunpod. There are some slight changes to panel lining in the part of the wing where the arms are stored, but otherwise this looks to be a less extreme modification than the five existing (four surviving) Delta Flight VF-31 Customs. One thing I will say is that I feel like the winglets give the game away... this VF-31 was designed with a Windermerean pilot in mind. Probably whoever's the new White Knight now that Keith and Roid have contracted a bad case of dead. That would, by literal process of elimination, mean that this VF-31 belongs to Bogue Con-Vaart unless some new pilot will be introduced. It won't be the twins because writers are loath to break up a set and Hermann's too old. If this is a collaboration between Xaos and Windermere, I wonder if it has the same derated FF-3001/FC2 engines used by the Siegfried customs or if it'll use the Draken III's more powerful FF-2999/FC2 engines.

I doubt such a thing exists, to be honest. Even if it did, that'd be pirated media and not something likely to be widely advertised or to stay online for very long due to copyright enforcement. Usually when Robotech fans are talking about that kind of thing it's them misrepresenting the animation made for the pachinko machine Macross Pachinko Fever as a high-definition remake of Robotech's "Macross Saga"... usually dubbed over with Robotech music instead of the original Macross soundtrack. Or, more rarely, incorrectly describing the remastered ADV Films DVD releases of the original shows (still in standard definition) as "HD".

Give it time, I'm sure they'll get there. I'm sure it'd make for a more compelling backstory than "sociopathic noblewoman expelled from school for drinking ink gets into a loveless marriage to indulge her fetish for fur clothing", or whatever they're trying to reinvent that (the backstory from the children's novel) into for this film. On watching this trailer again, I can say I am honestly not sure if replacing Emma Stone with Jared Leto in drag would improve this or not. I should probably just content myself with being surprised they didn't cast Helena Bonham Carter, since "crazy chick with messy hair" is basically her thing.

Sadly, the perfect actress is no longer with us... Bea Arthur. Who else in Hollywood specializes in playing "bitter and cantankerous" these days? Call it a Vote of No Confidence in Disney's writers after the Star Wars sequel trilogy, Solo: a Star Wars Story, Mulan, etc. Let's just say their track record for live-action adaptations and origin story prequels is not exactly good... (Cruella wasn't exactly a complex character either, even before the 1956 children's novel was cut down for the Disney animated adaptation... she was just a sociopath with what could only be called a fur fetish.)

Yes and no. It doesn't work quite like you describe, but it's absolutely possible to convert a heavy quantum beam gun or heavy quantum reaction beam gun to use dimension eater technology. Micro Dimension Eater (MDE) beam weaponry basically produces a particle beam made of micro-singularities. It's not necessarily more powerful than an equivalent heavy quantum reaction beam cannon of the same class/scale, but you could say it's the last word in armor piercing since those micro-singularities that make up the MDE beam cannon's output draw the matter they come in contact with into fold space. They were extremely effective against the Vajra, who had evolved their natural energy conversion armor to become resistant to thermonuclear reaction weapons and low-powered heavy quantum beam weapons late in the Macross Frontier TV series. To date, we have not seen a large-scale application of MDE beam weaponry along the lines of a warship-mounted offensive weapon. The VF-27 Lucifer's heavy quantum beam gunpod was upgraded to the MDE specification late in the Vajra conflict (TV ver.) to address its diminishing effectiveness against the highly adaptive Vajra. The YF-29's improved version of the VF-25 Tornado Pack's TW1 heavy quantum beam cannon turret (the TW2) was built as a MDE beam cannon turret which is noted to also be used by aircraft carriers (presumably as a point-defense gun). The novelization of Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy also gave the YF-30 an ordnance container that was outfitted with a twin-barrel MDE beam cannon turret. (In the game, this option is not present and the YF-30 is only ever armed with the missile container.) The VF-171EX's new gun pod was a combination unit that combined a 30mm machine gun with MDE shells with a larger MDE beam cannon.

Pretty sure the answer is "money". I'd originally thought about making a dig at how absurd Cruella de Vil's motivation is, but after some research I discovered that it wasn't until the early 2000s that the US and UK finally banned fur farming of cats and dogs and the imports of fur clothing made from cats and dosg and that they're STILL a common source for "faux' furs made in Asia. Gonna go down the history rabbit hole on this one, because now I'm actually genuinely curious if Cruella de Vil's particular taste would've been socially acceptable at the time Dodie Smith penned The Hundred and One Dalmatians back in 1956. I guess they're not sticking with her origin story from the book, though... where she was kind of an odd bird who was expelled from school for drinking ink, was a broke noble who married a furrier simply so she could get access to his unsold inventory as her personal wardrobe, and was basically completely batsh*t. At least there's room to do something interesting with Maleficent. She's a fairy, and a powerful one at that. Definitely agree there were better options to work with... Scar, Jafar, Shan Yu, the witch from Beauty and the Beast. Actually, no. I know what I want. I want an origin story for Kronk and Yzma from The Emperor's New Groove.

Disney... WHY?! I mean, I get that they're reluctant to gamble on original properties when the parks are hemorrhaging money and reluctant to risk antagonizing theater chains by releasing new films direct-to-streaming while theaters in many areas are shut down, but this is... this... I don't have a word for what this is. Did we really need an origin story for Disney villain whose one and only ambition in life was apparently to own a dogskin windcheater? This is like doing an origin story for the poacher McLeach from The Rescuers Down Under. He doesn't have or need a complicated origin. He's just an arsehose who's cruel to animals professionally. ... they already made Maleficent 2... it was called Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, and it came out back in 2019. It barely broke even, and got decidedly mixed reviews from critics.

Yup. It's also worth noting that, unlike a conventional thermonuclear reactor, this is why it's absolutely possible to turn a thermonuclear reaction furnace (AKA "fold reactor") into an ad hoc thermonuclear bomb as Misa did to the reactor underneath Mars Base Salla in "Bye Bye Mars". The reactor uses a Gravity and Inertia Control system to produce and control the heavy quanta needed to compress fuel and achieve fusion, so all you need to do to make the reactor into a bomb is put a LOT of fuel into the reaction chamber and produce a lot of heavy quanta, and then excite the heavy quanta all at once.

Thermonuclear reaction weapons are a practical form of pure fusion weapon. Put simply, a modern thermonuclear weapon (a hydrogen bomb) uses a uranium or plutonium-based nuclear fission warhead as a "primary" explosive to create the temperatures and pressures needed to induce fusion in the hydrogen isotopes that are the secondary warhead filler. This use of a smaller fission-based nuke to kick-start the fusion reaction that makes the H-bomb go is also why hydrogen bombs still leave behind hazardous radioisotopes. A thermonuclear reaction weapon omits that fission-based primary explosive and replaces it with heavy quantum. By exciting the heavy quantum with fold wave resonance, the heavy quantum's huge mass suspended in higher dimensional space drops into realspace and the intense gravitational force crushes the hydrogen fuel until a runaway fusion reaction starts and you get a thermonuclear explosion where almost all of the energy is released as heat and light. Because there's no fissile material involved, they produce little-to-nothing in the way of neutron radiation and no lingering radioisotopes to contaminate the blast area.

Never heard of it... but looking at the article, that the article makes frequent reference to Robotech and uses art from the Robotech role-playing game should've been a massive clue that it wasn't reliable. Not sure why they would be. Normally gunnery control on a modern warship is on the bridge unless the turret is being operated manually. Mercifully, it's a technology that the ancient Protoculture either didn't give them or couldn't give them. The destructive potential of thermonuclear reaction weaponry already far exceeds what conventional nuclear and thermonuclear weapons are capable of, since the technology isn't limited by the capabilities of a fission trigger due to the use of heavy quantum as an implosion trigger. Like dimensional beam weaponry, it's a weapon with the potential to totally depopulate a planet with a carpet bombing but it's not the kind of thing that could outright destroy a planet. Dimensional warheads are much, MUCH more destructive and even a dimensional warhead the size of a minivan can effectively destroy a planet like LAI's first effort did to Gallia IV. It's possible, with time and a lot of effort, to render a planet glassed by the Zentradi's heavy quantum reaction cannons to livable conditions. There's no fixing a planet that's been destroyed by the superintense gravity of a fold bomb. Macross's space fold tech works kind of similarly to Dune's... in that they're tying higher-dimensional space in knots to cause two volumes of realspace to violently swap places.

... I was rewatching Kaguya-sama: Love is War a bit ago, and noticed something I didn't the first time. Shirogane's dad is voiced by Takehito Koyasu. The glorious booming voice of none other than Jojo's Dio Brando. For now, I'm back to catching up on titles from previous seasons after a particularly trying day at work. Starting with the OVA Goblin Slayer: Goblin's Crown. It's not a compilation film, but it is doing quite a job of impersonating one given that the first 25 minutes of its 85 minute total runtime were wasted on a narrated recap of the events of the entire first season of the TV anime. The rest of the OVA adapts Vol.5 of the light novel, the Goblin Paladin story arc. I've heard that it's badly paced, and the parts I've seen so far definitely bear that out.

Which is...? Eh... having been dragged into, or quoted at considerable length in, entirely too many of those kind of "debates" I feel fairly safe in saying they're mostly bullsh*tting competitions where two sides talk past each other until one or both sides get frustrated and give up. Very rarely do two franchises have enough comparable types of detail for an objective comparison to be made. On the incredibly rare occasion that kind of debate happens, it isn't long-lived because inevitably one side outclasses the other by such a gargantuan margin that the entire premise is rendered comical like comparing Gundam's Universal Century to its close cousins Macross or Five Star Stories. You're probably going to be waiting a long time. Didn't Star Wars throw most, if not all, of that sh*t out years ago? When it comes to Valkyries, the technical manuals are pretty much explicitly non-canon until or unless their content is referenced in official setting material. Even so, they're somewhat more forgiving since a lot of the technology they discuss in detail in those books is quite real and the coverage of the fictional technology tends to be in much vaguer terms. Like as not, canon/continuity tends to be pretty important in material being marketed to fans. Casuals aren't going to care and thus aren't going to buy that stuff. It's the die-hards who are going to buy that sort of thing and examine it in detail and they tend to get rather twitchy when things change unexpectedly if they're not used to an airy-fairy "I do what a f*cking want" sort like Kawamori. Witness the brouhaha that ensued in Star Wars when Disney quietly broomed the moldering landfill that was the Star Wars expanded universe. High level is about all you're going to get from a completely fictional technology 99.999999% of the time. Normally if you're fool enough to ask the showrunners of a sci-fi series how their fictional tech works, they'll give you a smartarse answer like "it works very well, thank you". But, to summarize for your benefit: The ship's fold system isn't part of a super dimension energy cannon... the reason the disappearance of the Macross's fold system screwed the ship's main gun was because it took a substantial amount of the high-capacity power transfer conduits that linked those high-demand systems to the ship's power grid with it when it went. The Macross wasn't carrying a sufficient quantity of replacement conduit to bridge the newly opened gap in its power grid, so the modular transformation was devised to rearrange the ship and its power grid for the sake of reconnecting the main gun. As to how the weapon works... energized fold carbon is used as a catalyst to produce a particular type of exotic matter called heavy quantum possesses vast mass that exists mostly in higher dimensional "fold space" but also protrudes into our three-dimensional space. The heavy quanta are collected in the barrel of the gun and confined using a focused warp in spacetime similar to a pinpoint barrier. The gathered heavy quantum is then excited by fold wave resonance, which causes the heavy quantum's mass to drop into realspace and its own hyperintense gravity causes it to collapse on itself and auto-ignite in a thermonuclear fusion detonation. As with any cannon, it's essentially a pipe with one open end that's intended to allow all that energy only one direction in which to escape (read: "This End Towards Enemy"). So that confined fusion detonation of the gathered heavy quantum winds up as a high-velocity fusion plasma beam that's decidedly unhealthy to be in the path of. It's not dissimilar in principle to the mega-particle weapons of Gundam's Universal Century... or the nuclear bazooka from Gundam 0038: Stardust Memory. Have you looked at the turrets? There's nowhere for a gunner to sit in there. Yes... the in-universe population found that rather unhelpful as well. The logistical problems of running an interstellar civilization using space fold technology were a direct cause of both the Protoculture's civil war and the New UN Government's own Second Unification War. It's very hard to govern a colony that's years away for even your fastest ships even in ideal conditions and could be temporarily cut off by anomalies ("fold faults") in higher-dimensional space that could disrupt travel, communication, or both, or force messages and ships to painstakingly circumnavigate the disruption at the cost of far more time. That was one reason among many that fold quartz was such a valuable, highly sought-after commodity. Fold systems made with fold quartz instead of fold carbon were powerful enough to be mostly or entirely unaffected by those disruptions in higher-dimensional spacetime. Unfortunately, the same properties that make it even better at helping to make incredibly powerful local gravitational effects had more applications than just buffering inertial g-forces or tying space-time in knots to teleport. They could also be used to make weapons of frankly apocalyptic power, which is why the already rare material that could only be obtained from Vajra carcasses and Protoculture ruins was heavily regulated by the New UN Government... to prevent the proliferation of planet-killing WMDs. The longest single fold jump explicitly mentioned in-series is approximately 1,000 light years. Most fold jumps are explicitly of much shorter range, usually a few dozen to at most a few hundred light years like the 11.7 light year trip from Eden to Earth in Macross Plus, the 12 light year fold jump the Macross Quarter made to the location of the Macross Galaxy fleet refugees, or the 30 light year trip that Hayate and Freyja took from Al Shahal to Ragna for her audition. A long-distance fold jump seems to be somewhere around 800 light years... the distance of the Macross Frontier's emergency fold to escape the Vajra and the distance separating Ragna from Windermere IV.

Which wiki do you mean? The Macross Compendium wiki - AKA "the reliable one" - has never said anything about the size of other Main Fleets. The one freehosted at fandom.net is entirely useless because its lax or nonexistent content moderation has left it a dumpster fire of unsourced statements, misinformation, fanon, and fan-fiction. It's so poorly-researched and poorly-edited it wouldn't be headed the wrong way rebranding itself as a wiki for the R-word series. Versus debates are usually pretty pointless without an objective framework for comparison. Mind you, the problem here is simply that we don't know how big Zentradi main fleets originally were. According to Macross Chronicle, contemporary main fleets number between several hundred thousand and several million warships. Odds are it would have been impossible to produce such a document covering all existing Zentradi forces even when the Protoculture were still around, given how decentralized the production of Zentradi troops, ships, and other war materiel was (by design). Never mind any potential innovations, improvements, and new design rollouts that may have occurred on one side or the other during the Stellar Republic's civil war and the early phases of the war against the Supervision Army. (Like the enemy battle suit from Macross Plus, which is hypothesized to have been developed under such circumstances.) It's quite rare for Japanese media to go into such an exhaustive level of detail. Even for western media like Star Trek or Star Wars, publications with that level of detail are generally non-canon or pseudo-canon at best. Mind you, the mass production of war materiel for the Zentradi forces is heavily decentralized and the individual fully-automated factory satellites have been independently making refinements to the designs they produce for the last 500,000 years. So two ships of the same class made at the same time by two different factory satellites may not have the same exact specs or internal layout, or even two ships of the same class made at the same factory satellite a few millennia apart. How a ship's main gun is powered is no mystery. It's connected to the ship's power grid, which is energized by the ship's clusters of thermonuclear reactors. Likewise, the gunnery stations aren't exactly a mystery. They're one of the workstation "blisters" on a ship's bridge. How far ships can fold is something as dependent on local conditions as it is on the amount of energy a ship can store and the performance of the ship's fold system.

All in all, it really is just embarrassing for Star Trek that individual fan YouTube pages can produce more professional-looking content in their spare time than CBS can manage with an $8M+ per episode budget. Especially when it comes to that Star Trek: Picard one... that's assembled from upscaled stock footage, and it looks substantially better than the brand-new digital VFX created for the series.

It's difficult to say... because our only view into the size and composition of Zentradi forces is their operating conditions after ~500,000 years of sustained attrition warfare and after at least some of the equipment the Protoculture originally created for them was lost with the destruction of the factory satellites producing it. In short, we've never seen a Zentradi fleet in what you might call "mint condition". We can't say that the Boddole Zer fleet was a typical size, larger, or smaller than the average because we don't have an average. Macross II's timeline kind of leaned towards Boddole Zer's fleet being a nice middle-of-the-road sized formation. When it comes to Macross II's timeline - Macross 2036 and Macross: Eternal Love Song in particular - it's still difficult to say if individual Zentradi main fleets are equipped differently or not every fleet has lost the same designs over the intervening millennia. For instance, we know that the factory satellites producing the Glaug were destroyed and the Glaugs that the Boddole Zer fleet uses were units recovered from storage at a weapons depot some time after the factory satellite was lost. We don't know if battle pods and suits like the Gruza Frii, Exa Glaug, Rogren Ro, Shigunomiyu, and Shrukeru Gao were designs that the Boddole Zer fleet never had, or had lost access to over time. The Burado and Neld fleets still had them. As ethically dubious as creating a clone army is just on its own, even the ancient Protoculture tried to at least give the clone soldiers they'd created some kind of quality of life. Rank and file Zentradi might've been considered borderline disposable but they still got to sleep in actual beds (in bunkrooms that would be considered surprisingly spacious compared to modern human warships), their food actually resembled real food, and they even had alcoholic beverage rations. Higher-ranking Zentradi apparently even had private quarters, like Vrlitwhai. The Mardook treated their Zentradi a lot more harshly, using mind control to strictly regulate them to the point of considering them little more than biological robots they had zero qualms about ordering into suicide attacks.

Tomino and Nagano had very different visions for Heavy Metal L-Gaim, and the result of their battling it out was definitely underwhelming as a series. 's why Mamoru Nagano declared a massive do-over and made Five Star Stories instead, to tell a more polished version of the story in a more expansive version of the setting.

There are several possible explanations. As @sketchley noted, one likely explanation is that the four engines are needed to provide a surplus of generator power for something like a high-powered heavy quantum beam cannon ala the YF/VF-27. Another potential explanation would be a brute force attempt to make up the difference in thrust-to-weight ratio between the previous-gen thermonuclear reaction burst turbine engines and the new, but far more expensive, Stage II thermonuclear reaction turbine engines. With two 539.37kN-class thermonuclear reaction burst turbine engines, the AIF-7S Ghost has a thrust-to-weight ratio of a hair under 19.3. Compared to a 4th Gen VF like the VF-171, VF-19, or VF-22, that was substantial. So much so that it exceeded the VF-19's most high-spec custom variant (Basara's Fire Valkyrie) by a narrow margin and is almost double what the standard NUNS main fighter can do. The problem with drone wingmen keeping up with 5th Gen VFs is that a 5th Gen VF's average thrust-to-weight ratio hovers around 40... twice what the AIF-7 is capable of. Since Stage II engines are expensive and the /FC types doubly so, installing them on a drone may be cost-prohibitive. Using more engines may be a way to brute force the drone's performance up to a level where it can keep up with 5th Generation manned VFs. Smart money says it's a drone. One tiny nitpick... the VF-27 has four main engines, all the same FF-3011 type. Instead of two main engines and two less powerful sub-engines, it has four identical engines at lower power. The YF-29's goal was higher mobility than what could be achieved through aerodynamics alone, at least according to Macross Chronicle. The sheet does mention that it's presumed that it can fire multiple high-output laser weapons simultaneously because of "an unknown technology of the Protodeviln". That's under the "Fighter mode" section on the FBz-99G sheet. Well... yes and no? The actual correct term for that isn't commonly used except by programmers working on assembly language or other low-level functions like embedded control architectures. When powers of 10 are being used for consumer convenience, they use SI prefixes, but there are actually special terms for the binary equivalents that go by 1,024s... the kibibyte, mebibyte, gibibyte, and so on. If you see the unit written with a lowercase "i" in the middle (e.g. KiB, MiB, GiB) it's the binary equivalent. Almost nobody remembers these are separate units and will often read KiB as kilobyte. According to Macross Chronicle, there were at one point around 5,000 fleet motherships were mass-produced. It's unclear if all main fleets were originally the same size... which makes such a determination difficult. In that specific case, it's also worth noting that the areas of the ship where corridors are usually seen are in the ship's crew/residential areas inside the saucer section and primarily mid-shift when foot traffic through those areas would be at its absolute lowest. The one we see the most of - Vrlitwhai's ship - is, in scale to its crew about twice the size of a Galaxy-class Federation Starship from Star Trek. If you work backwards from the total population of the Boddole Zer fleet the average ship crew is somewhere on the order of 1,500, which would explain why the corridors aren't packed. The RPG's line was that everyone except the ship's command crew and deck protection were stored in cold sleep between battles... which was very much at odds with the animation that clearly showed the crew living in bunkrooms when off duty, and said bunkrooms being where most of the swapping of human cultural paraphernalia occurred in the TV series. In Macross II, the Mardook's Zentradi were kept in brainwashing booths most of the time.

Yup... thermonuclear reaction weaponry is kind of a kingmaker in Macross. It's a key reason the New UN Spacy can get away with being a numerically-inferior carrier-based force instead of a weight-of-numbers battleship-based force like the Zentradi. When a single VF can carry enough thermonuclear reaction munitions to sink two or three Zentradi warships, they punch WAY above their weight class when the typical NUNS carrier has an aircraft complement of 60-75 VFs and a supercarrier like a Battle-class carries ten times that. Knowing that the Zentradi and Supervision Army used to be armed with thermonuclear reaction weaponry also goes a long ways towards explaining how the Zentradi have lost two thousand main fleets in the last 500,000 years.

Perhaps... but it would be a very bad idea. As noted above, more would be a bad idea. Why? Because weapons that can sink even a large warship in a single hit are commonplace... and used to be even more so, back before the factory satellites producing thermonuclear reaction weaponry were lost. For the ancient Protoculture, warfare in an era where large-scale super dimension energy cannons and thermonuclear reaction missiles meant a ship could easily be sunk in a single hit would have made large warships carrying tens of thousands of soldiers a profoundly unattractive idea. Mobile Fortresses were large enough to repeatedly tank firepower that'd sink a ship of the line outright and their limited capacity for self-repair meant that they could reasonably get away with doing it every now and again, but they were so vast and the sheer size of them made them vulnerable to death by a thousand cuts from large numbers of smaller warships. The obvious way to address that massive firepower for ships of the line was numbers. By having many smaller ships with relatively small crew and mecha complements individually, losing a single ship or even a small group of ships meant less loss of manpower and materiel than losing a single super-massive battleship crewed by tens of thousands. Especially since a ship the size you're talking about could still be sunk in just one clean hit by a ship a tiny fraction of its size. To a certain extent, though size is only relevant in terms of the gun's ability to collect heavy quanta... which is more a function of how much power the ship can generate.