Seto Kaiba

Yeah, Macross is reasonably consistent about this. Well, remember... Roy might've been on a UN Navy warship in Macross Zero, but he was a UN Spacy officer commanding a squadron of UN Spacy fighter pilots who were there for model conversion training in preparation for adopting the VF-1 Valkyrie. Sort of... I guess you could say that when everyone is essentially using folded-space teleportation to get around, there aren't any "space lanes" to protect. There is passing mention in Macross Plus of some kind of patrol force out in deep space that Isamu was very briefly assigned in late 2038 and early 2039 before he irritated his latest round of superiors and was dumped on another assignment.

Yup. After the war they added the Spacy Air Force and Spacy Marine Corps. Barring one or two incidences where Destroids have inexplicable markings like "US Army", all of the Destroids we see in the Super Dimension Fortress Macross series are indicated to be UN Spacy assets. The line art for the Tomahawk, Phalanx, Defender, and Spartan shows they have UN SPACY stenciled on them (typically on the front of the right ankle and back of the left, opposite the bumper code). To the best of my knowledge, prior to Macross Frontier giving us a look at the New UN Spacy Marine Corps via the 33rd Marines on Gallia IV the only time we were ever shown any characters who were explicitly from another branch of service was in Macross II: Lovers Again. The standard UN Forces uniform in that OVA was color-coded based on what branch a person belonged to. The only two variants whose associated branches were explicitly identified in the artbooks were the Spacy (whose base color was black) and the Army (khaki). The unnamed officer (believed to be a Colonel) we see commanding Earth's surface-based defenses in the OVA's last two episodes was the first (and AFAIK only) character to be explicitly identified as a UN Army soldier. (He is helpfully wearing a patch on his right arm which says "ARMY" where the Spacy characters have "SPACY", seen on page 33 of This is Animation Special #5: Macross II.)

"Space is an ocean" is a fairly common trope in sci-fi... even if it's not altogether appropriate. I suspect it likely had a lot to do with Shoji Kawamori being a military aviation enthusiast. The sort of bloke who would have known somewhat obscure facts like a space fleet would fall under Air Force jurisdiction or a separate space force would be spun off of the Air Force if it were created in the modern day. That his fictional space force - the UN Spacy - took the form of a Space Army with its own Air Service likely reflects the dual role the VF-1 Valkyrie occupied... it is both Aircraft and Infantry in the planned-for war against giant aliens. I think this is reflected, to a certain extent, in how shipboard life on the Macross was depicted. Hikaru and the other pilots don't live aboard the aircraft carriers attached to the SDF-1 Macross like you'd expect a naval aviator to do. They live on an army base inside the ship's habitat section. You could think of the Macross as a spacegoing town built on a large and suspiciously well-armed army base. Being incapable of independent operation, the Prometheus is less aircraft carrier and more an airfield adjoining the base. In the ARMD-class's development history you see shades of this as they were developed as space airfields to be installed in orbit as a staging area for space fighters before someone arrived at the idea of putting engines and weapons on them. What we have in the UN Spacy and New UN Spacy is something that isn't wholly any one branch of the modern armed forces. The ranks are Army-style, it operates ships and fighter squadrons that use Navy-style designations and honors some naval traditions in the course of daily life, it spun off its own Marine Corps AND an Air Force. It maintains both aircraft that double as infantry and its own armored fighting vehicles that are also ersatz infantry.

Not as such, no. Granted, I did state that in the real world a space fleet would fall under the administrative jurisdiction of the Air Force. In hindsight, I should have added as an addendum to that the caveat of "unless a new branch of service is specifically established to administrate and operate it". Logically, that would be spun off the branch of service that already has overall responsibility for military operations in space: the Air Force. In Macross, the UN Spacy seems to be set up as a Space Army with its own Air Service. They're committed enough to the Army schtick that the Destroids even have Army style bumper code markings in the line art along the lines of the system that was established in the 1940's with AR-850-5. For maximum irony, the translation of Super Dimension Fortress Macross that Egan Loo himself consulted on translates the enlisted ranks as Army ones rather than Air Force. Hikaru is referred to as a Sergeant when his rank is given as 軍曹, and both Max and Kakizaki are referred to as Corporal when their rank is given as 伍長 rather than the Compendium wiki's Staff Sergeant and Sergeant respectively. It'd be nice if we had a bigger sample to work with, but Super Dimension Fortress Macross was the only time we had characters who were enlisted rather than officers or officer trainees right from the outset. DYRL? made Hikaru, Max, and Kakizaki all 2nd Lieutenants at the outset. As the Spacy ends up being a distinct entity from the Spacy Air Force, I'd say Army style for the Spacy rather than Air Force is probably the safer bet. EDIT: No help from the video games... Skull squadron's Purple platoon from the Super Dimension Fortress Macross video game is a 1st Lieutenant and a pair of Sergeants.

Well, yes... unless the translation convention at work in the series that's rendering what is officially supposed to be spoken English into Japanese for the convenience of the domestic audience is concealing the use of some special title analogous to the one that exists in Japanese.

Well, Southern Cross mecha toys... there's still that indie guy making action figures, right? Oh captain my captain? IIRC he'd said he was abandoning Southern Cross stuff because it'd been licensed. If the MAAS Toys license isn't valid anymore (or never was) then he should be in the clear. The propulsion system isn't in the feet... but yes, there are a lot of really illogical design choices in the Spartas and the other Southern Cross mecha. Partly it's a product of the troubled production's rushed schedule, and partly the designers themselves not being accustomed to designing mecha. Whether or not it would sell is academic at this point given that the most recent news about it is that MAAS Toys is broke and going out of business.

... honestly, this sounds like a sanitized version of Red Dwarf set in the Star Trek universe...

Oh, same... G1 Transformers was huge when I was a kid. (Ah, the days when popular fiction thought five inch floppy disks held enough information to destroy the world or unlock the secrets of creation...) Macross's creators... and the shows themselves. Now, your confusion on this subject is understandable because everything you just said about the Japanese terminology is completely correct. Translating the Japanese terms for military ranks is contextual unless they're prefaced by a branch of service. Some fiction authors provide that context themselves in the form of explicit guidance to their translators and/or onscreen conspicuous English, and some don't. Gundam's creators are often in the latter category. Macross's are in the former. Mind you, when it comes to space fleets, in popular fiction there tends to be an improper Navy bias rather than an Army one... since in reality a space fleet would fall under the jurisdiction of the Air Force (something that the makers of Stargate SG-1 got right and almost everyone else got wrong). There are a lot of things one can do in the Navy, and the Village People will sing about them given half a chance, but holding ranks like First Lieutenant and Staff Sergeant are not among them. There are a number of instances in Macross where the ranks of characters are shown on screen in conspicuous English, and they are invariably Army-style ranks. For instance, in the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series episode "Blind Game", if you look at the markings on the ES-11D Cat's Eye reconnaissance plane you'll see that the name and rank of its pilot stenciled on the canopy frame read "S/SGT. H. IWATA" and Misa's seat is marked "F/LIEUT. M. HAYASE". Macross Plus shows us a biographical summary from Isamu's personnel files at one point (which was faithfully transcribed, typos and all, into the liner notes), in which his affiliation is given as "UN SPACY" and his rank as "FIRST LIEUTENANT". Macross Frontier publications provide the katakana for the SDFN-04's name as ジェネラル・ブルーノ・J・グローバル... "General Bruno J. Global" and SDFN-01's name as ジェネラル・ハヤセ "General Hayase" (presumably its full name is the General Takashi Hayase, Bruno Global's friend, mentor, and superior officer). Likewise, Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy provides us with SDFN-08's name as ジェネラル・ブリタイ・クリダニク "General Vrlitwhai Kridanik" (using the official spelling of his name provided in the on-screen English text that accompanied the aforementioned katakana). IIRC the official English subs produced in Japan for the Macross Frontier movies and the Macross Delta TV series and movie use Army ranks as well for both PMC personnel and the named NUNS ones. Macross II's creators also reportedly dictated that the ranks in the OVA were to be translated as Army ones, which led to US Renditions giving Nex Gilbert an informal promotion to Major to avoid "Captain" (title) vs. "Captain" (rank) problems. These characters are all explicitly in the UN Spacy or New UN Spacy. You can't be a Staff Sergeant or a General in a Navy, and First Lieutenant is a billet there rather than a rank... so the logical conclusion (as if the creators hadn't already told us the answer) is that it's an Army-style rank system. No worries. I'm as pedantic as they go, and this particularly confusing subject comes up at least once or twice a year so I've been used to it for a long long time. The understandable confusion certainly isn't helped by the fact that, prior to his transfer into the Spacy to assume captaincy of the Oberth-class space destroyer Goddard, our boy Bruno J. Global was a Commander in the UN Navy aboard the submarine Marco Polo. (The UN Forces and New UN Forces seem to take a very Japanese view of transfers between branches of the armed forces.) Nor, for that matter, is it helped that the (New) UN Forces steal a lot of their designation system from the US Tri-Service ones, and lifted their hull classification symbols and their Spacy squadron designations from the US Navy despite the Spacy explicitly not being a Navy and not using Naval ranks. It's been a while since I visited his blog, but the short story you're thinking of is "Super Dimension Fortress Macross: the UN Wars: the Plundering Fleet" from the Macross Perfect Memory artbook. That was the long form version of the anecdote Global shared with Misa on their elevator ride down to the base under Grand Cannon 1 in Alaska, where as an officer serving with her father on the UN Navy submarine Marco Polo, his crew had staged a fake enemy raid on their own side's supplies because their superiors were being dickish about resupplying their ship's badly depleted stores. Naval ranks would've been appropriate there, since at the time both Hayase and Global were serving in the UN Navy. (The UN Spacy was barely a year old at the time.) EDIT: For fun, I'll be spending a good chunk of this weekend crawling around the interior of an old Forrest Sherman-class destroyer... so, y'know, go Navy. DD-946 USS Edson, for the curious.

Sorry, two characters who only have half a dozen lines... and that guy went down like a b*tch to some basic Inbit grunt. It's almost as humiliating as the Zor Lords being taken out by a boy-crazy airhead and her mentally ill crush with the purple mullet. Since this topic has now suffered a complete derailment in the wake of another one of Robotech's inevitable embarrassing failures, I'll throw caution to the wind and just pour fuel on the fire for the sake of watching this magnificent disaster accelerate into its death spiral: Rey is the only interesting Star Wars protagonist because she's the only one who isn't being railroaded into a predetermined destiny by the Force and her bloodline. Let the galaxy burn!

The scene you're thinking of is in Macross Zero, where Roy mentions that the energy converting armor gives the VF-0 the toughness of a tank. EDIT: About 20:20 into Macross Zero's first episode, when Roy and Raizo are talking about the VF-0's in the hangar on the Asuka II.

Only if it's accompanied by maniacal laughter appropriate to quality necromancy. We have standards, you know. Groans in sailor Eh? The Spacy's not a "space navy" though... the most literal translation would be "space military" or "space army". Organizationally, the UN Spacy and New UN Spacy borrow at least as much from the Army Air Force as it does from the Navy, though the rank system is explicitly Army-style and always has been. Tellingly, it spun off both an Air Force and a Marine Corps. Bruno J. Global held the rank of Brigadier General in the UN Spacy at the start of the First Space War, and when he finally retired he was a General essentially by dint of being one of the highest-ranked survivors of the UN Forces. Energy converting armor is one overtechnology that I've only ever seen explained in somewhat vague terms. Physically, energy converting armor is described as a layered, laminated smart material made of hypercarbon composite armor material and an unspecified laminate that are said to become significantly tougher when charged by electromagnetic pulses. That would suggest that it's some kind of advanced magnetoactive polymer, but the exact mechanism isn't clear. The extent of its ability to change toughness is directly tied to the amount of electromagnetic field energy it's exposed to, which makes it REALLY hard to pin down exactly what physical principle is being leveraged. For instance, the YF-29 uses the same armor material as the VF-25 but twice the material thickness and twice the power supplied to it produces four times the defensive ability. It could be that it's using some kind of reverse dielectric elastomer to change the rigidity of the armor plating and laminate layers or there could be some more exotic effect that's changing the molecular bonds inside the composite and/or laminate to reversibly make them more resistant to deformation (like a memory metal that's constantly being pumped). Maybe the electromagnetic field the system uses causes the armor plates to repel each other, resisting compression forces, while the laminate keeps them in alignment and spreads shock to prevent deformation. Who knows? (EDIT: that last one might be my new favorite contender...) It's a mystery I'd like to find an answer to once my translation project kicks into high gear in earnest later this year. For the most part, it's Kawamori's explanation for the inconsistent toughness displayed by VFs throughout the first couple Macross shows. VF-1's were seemingly Made of Explodium in Fighter mode, but in GERWALK or Battroid mode they could bull through reinforced concrete structures with little more than a couple scuffs in the paint to show for it. This got particularly egregious in Macross Plus, where the YF-19-1 was supposedly totaled in a crash that killed its pilot but a GERWALK mode VF-11 piloted by Isamu comes out halfway intact with only moderate injuries to its pilot and we later see the YF-19-2 and YF-21 ramming through whole buildings at speed with no damage. Kawamori first mentioned energy converting armor in the mid-90's, but it didn't actually get an in-story mention until Macross Zero and they didn't really start harping on it until the Macross Frontier series started harping on the Vajra having energy converting armor in their carapaces that exceeded the defensive ability of even the latest VFs and made 'em extremely difficult to kill.

This link I posted back on page 5 is likely to be the last news we'll ever get on this project: https://toy-wizards.com/2019/04/17/toy-news-rumor-maas-toys-goes-under-customers-demand-refunds/ TL;DR: MAAS Toys is broke and effectively out of business. Their pissed-off customers are filing Paypal grievances in the hopes of getting refunds, and BigBadToyStore have cancelled all MAAS Toys preorders. What I've heard from folks inside HG is that they spent most of the voice actor budget hiring him - to do background voices and a character who has half a dozen lines tops - in the hopes that his name on the box would catch the attention of Star Wars fans. Making a mint. Regardless of whether your personal feelings about it, that was a major studio's AAA flagship property that made over $1.333 billion at the box office. "Slumming it" is appearing in a project like Shadow Chronicles that barely made back its shoestring budget. Well, as an alternative, you have a lot of potential ways to react to the fact that the entire MAAS Toys Southern Cross announcement was basically a sham perpetrated by a group of bootleg toy makers who were looking for a way to cover their debts and couldn't actually afford to make anything? Relief, amusement, concern, and dismay are all valid options there... a real emotional smorgasboard.

Shadow Chronicles was even more of an unfinished project than Southern Cross was... it's literally JUST the introductory episode for a cancelled 3-4 part OVA. Southern Cross at least got to get over 1/3 of the way done before the network put them on notice. That is called Mark Hamill slumming. Half full of what is the question...

Granted, this whole "the VF-1 Valkyrie is still in widespread military service" schtick is mostly Master File swinging for the fences to justify doing a fourth book about the VF-1, so it isn't altogether surprising that their justification is vague and wandering. They've got virtually identical cockpits, so I'm not sure one would necessarily be more comfortable than the other. Shinsei Industry has had a LOT of time to refine the VF-1's ANGIRAS airframe control AI though, so it's probably about the most stable and forgiving training VF you could ask for.

They look like the outrigger gun-arms on the Strike Gundam's METEOR system. That's an easy one. Robotech fans hated Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles, so Harmony Gold won't do more comics for that for fear that it wouldn't sell. Robotech Academy was an embarrassing and VERY public failure in no small part because the fans hated the entire premise, so they're going to bury that one and pretend it never happened like they did when that same thing happened to Robotech 3000.

I'm just going to be over here in the corner singing Ave Maria in the hopes that we won't have to rehash that steaming turd in any detail.

You'd think pioneer planets would want to adopt the latest, most capable fighters in order to maximize the capabilities of their numerically limited defense forces. Even then, we've seen (or read) that emigrant fleets do commonly use older models of variable fighter for various purposes. For instance, in the manga Macross 7 Trash we see that the 37th large scale long distance emigrant fleet "Macross 7" is using VF-4's as training aircraft and test airframes for evaluating certain new technologies. A testing accident that resulted in the loss of a VF-4 and the death of a soldier is what kick-starts the plot by instigating Mahara Fabrio's resignation from the military. Later, in the light novel Macross the Ride, it's noted that the 55th large scale long distance emigrant fleet "Macross Frontier" is still in the process of decommissioning and selling or scrapping its remaining inventory of VF-11 Thunderbolts in 2058. Main character Chelsea Scarlett buys three VF-11 airframes from the fleet's NUNS in order to construct her (third) racing VF to compete in the Vanquish League. The VF-5000 would probably be a less than ideal choice since it's principally made for atmospheric service. Ideally you'd want something like the VF-14, which can operate for long periods in space without needing FAST Packs or conformal fuel tanks. The VF-11's a step in the right direction but it still suffers from most of the same problems the VF-1 had. The timing definitely makes it sound like the official setting VF-1X++ Valkyrie Double Plus and not-official setting VF-1Z are closely related, both allegedly being mid-to-late 2040s era modernizations of the VF-1 that benefit from the improved materials and electronics available at the time. Where they seem to differ is that the VF-1X++ apparently kept all of the structural refinements made by earlier improvement programs and focused on weight reduction and strength improvement, while the VF-1Z seems to be all about undoing the refinements and creating an updated version of the original VF-1 design with modern materials. In terms of the official setting, the VF-1 has stuck around as long as it has and been so widely produced because it was a comparatively cheap training aircraft whose handling had been refined to the point that you'd have to really really suck to crash one and it wouldn't break the bank if you did. Its performance is low enough that it's not going to seriously test the limits of a trainee's g-force endurance even accidentally. The military kept some around for training purposes for that reason, and improved special forces variants that it could use for "covert" operations... if anything involving a twelve-and-a-half meter tall robot could be considered "covert".

Libera temet ex infernis... Seriously, there are things man was not meant to know.

Oh yeah, it did have some cone-like bits that looked like GN drives.

I was thinking more of the one bomber design that they stole from Transformers, the hideous Garfish class ship with all that extra junk on it, and the other "original" ship design that was just one of the Macross class gun booms on its own.

The original plan was a Spartas but it mutated into a Spartas and Auroran running in parallel, IIRC. I was one of the one who had pledged for an Auroran, which is why I mentioned it.

That's kind of Sophie's Choice for Southern Cross fans... If Harmony Gold keeps the Robotech franchise limping along they will continue neglecting Southern Cross becuase it's unpopular and focusing almost exclusively on Macross. If Harmony Gold loses the Robotech franchise, it's unlikely anyone will take an interest in the Southern Cross license for its own sake since the show was a failure in Japan in its original format and a failure outside of Japan as a part of Robotech. It's tough but fair. The very rough, amateurish animation used in the promotional materials and the terrible and terribly unoriginal design works were targets of harsh criticism during the Kickstarter campaign. More than a few Robotech fans suggested that it looked like Harmony Gold had outsourced animation and design to high schoolers on DeviantArt. That was an issue, but the problems with it were so all-encompassing that no one problem can claim a majority or even plurality of credit for the failure. A lot of Robotech fans were PO'd that it was another Robotech 1 7/8: Approximately the Sentinels type project like Shadow Chronicles or the UEEF Marines RPG sourcebook instead of just finishing Sentinels or Shadow Chronicles (or both). Given what's been leaked from Harmony Gold, Shadow Chronicles parts 2-4 were canceled shortly after part 1's release. Tommy Yune made a lot of promises to his bosses to get funding for Shadow Chronicles part 1, and when it failed to set the world on fire like he'd promised (garnering instead a resounding "meh" from Robotech fans and going unnoticed by everyone else) they'd reminded him that the deal was parts 2-4 were to be funded by sponsors attracted by part 1 and quietly canceled the whole mess while pinning their hopes for the future on Warner Bros. (This is why Robotech Academy was done as a Kickstarter, HG's management was flat-out done with trying to fund the Robotech franchise's development after Shadow Chronicles failed to deliver.) Talk to @captain america. Like Obi-Wan Kenobi, he is your only hope now... and his kits would be pretty much guaranteed to do a more faithful rendering of the designs than MAAS Toys. (Assuming you can round up enough people to fund it. We failed to do so previously.)

I would love to know why they censor that... (and if you ever want a domain that doesn't censor you like that, our doors remain ever open to you.) It makes a certain amount of sense and fits well with the Macross Frontier-era assertions that commercially-available VF-1s and VT-1s are common enough that they're used for pilot training even in civilian vocational schools like Mihoshi Academy (which is indicated to have maintained a number of VF-1Cs for its space navigation majors). Based on my understanding of the VF-1X++ as it's described in Macross the Ride's materials, my conclusion would be that the VF-1X++ and VF-1Z represent two different offshoots of the VF-1X+ that was used by the New UN Forces into the 2040s. The VF-1Z sounds like it's a general duty variant where the VF-1X++ was said to be a high-performance variant produced for the NUNS Special Forces for use in covert operations and the like.

Oh, it was. Palladium Books presided over a complete and utter fiasco. Their naive incompetence, massive overconfidence, and overestimation of actual demand for a Robotech tabletop game to a frankly comical extent based on the Kickstarter campaign's payout made the project self-sabotaging to the point that it swiftly devolved into a rolling multi-year public relations disaster for the Robotech brand. The PR fallout from Palladium's Robotech Kickstarter had a measurable role in the failure of Harmony Gold's own attempt to use Kickstarter to finance a pilot for a new Robotech TV series. When that Robotech Academy Kickstarter campaign inevitably failed as a result of Harmony Gold's public displays of massive hubris (bragging that fans would be throwing their money at it), the shameless attempt to exploit Carl Macek's passing a few years earlier to get fans to open their wallets ("Make Carl's dream a reality!"), the concept art and animation looking like arse thanks to having been done by a South American fan film group HG had shut down years earlier, and the distrust of Kickstarter sown in their fandom by Palladium's ongoing clusterf*ck, it led to HG ragequitting the Kickstarter about a week before it was due to end when it became apparent they were unlikely to even come close to their funding goal (after a month they barely hit 38%). All of that public embarrassment for Harmony Gold and the Robotech brand was what prompted management there to set a condition in all future license agreements that there would be no crowdfunding of any kind for licensed Robotech merchandise. That, of course, was the VERY BIG PROBLEM that put the brakes on MAAS Toys's plans for a line of licensed Southern Cross toys. They would've been in violation of the terms of their license if they'd used Kickstarter, Indiegogo, or a privately run crowdfunding drive, and without crowdfunding they couldn't afford to keep the lights on let alone finish the design and start production. As catch-22's go, it's a doozy. Really? This kind of crash-and-burn abject failure has been the norm for Robotech for like 33 years now. Southern Cross itself isn't exactly a stranger to it either, if we're being honest. For that very reason, I don't think that MAAS Toys's implosion will have any measurable effect on how the perceived viability of the Southern Cross license. Not that that's cause for good cheer, mind you. It's because the vast majority of toy companies had already written Robotech off entirely as commercially unviable, and the ones that hadn't yet (like Toynami) wrote Southern Cross off as commercially unviable based on its status as the Robotech fandom's un-favorite saga. Perceived demand for Southern Cross toys was never not at rock bottom, so a realist would say there's no impact and optimist would say there's nowhere to go but up.

Right on the Macross Compendium's timeline. Edit: the article title for it is "Before 1 BC"