Seto Kaiba

Hey, it's Hoyer's little leisure craft from Macross 7 Trash...

Well, this is now officially a translator pet peeve thread... Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here. I notice it fairly often, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were more slipping past me. I may be American, but virtually all of my coworkers speak British English being Brits themselves or from former crown colonies. (Sadly, this has not given me any insight into the appeal of cricket... it remains as alien to me now as it was when I first read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.) Believe me, I'm not altogether happy with it either... but it's the closest term I've found that communicates that we're talking about the supranational government/military rather than that of the individual member nations to the predominantly American audience here. There's gotta be a better word out there to capture that particular dichotomy, but it escapes me. (I am open to suggestions. I'd previously tried referring to it as the "central" government/forces but that seemed to be insufficiently clear in many cases.) I'd guess it might be easier for an American audience to get their heads around if the EU moved forward with Germany's proposals for a supranational European Army. It wasn't something that Macross really made prominent until Macross Delta, when the subject of "can we expect assistance from the supranational armed forces?" came up fairly prominently in an episode. I feel it might be a smidge more accurate to say that the current state of the New Unification Government is more reminiscent of the European Union. Prior to the reorganization of the government and military brought about by the conclusion of the Second Unification War, the New Unification Government was more along the lines of the American Federal Government in that it was a strong central government that exerted broad authority over its member states. That, of course, was the whole reason that conflict happened at all... folks in the emigrant governments were unhappy with the increasing concentration of governing authority in the central government, and there was a faction within the government and military working to increase that centralization of power (the bad guys in VF-X2). Given the strong American bias Kawamori introduced in his worldbuilding of the [New] UN Forces, using the American terms for levels of organization like that is probably a "best fit" scenario. Obnoxiously, that seems to change between versions of the Macross Frontier story. IIRC it's the TV series that leans slightly French while the novelization(s) lean more towards American with the inclusion of an American-style Vice President on the list of officials that Leon has to have murdered in order to seize the office of Frontier President.

Are you possibly thinking of "fighter/attacker" rather than fighter/bomber? Because I've seen statements that the aircraft that the QF-3000 Ghost was based on was a fighter/attacker multirole aircraft, but I've never seen the bomber role associated with it. Its weapons are exclusively short-ranged, consisting of six 55mm cannons and 2 3-tube missile launchers mounted in the fixed-forward position behind the guns... and a lifting body like that can't carry much under the fuselage without screwing up its own aerodynamics. Design-wise, it's more or less a freshened version of the Martin Marietta X-24A/SV-5J lifting body prototype with armaments. That experimental aircraft was used to test the feasbility of several design choices that were being made for the space shuttle. (There is a nod to this in the form of Kawamori's VF-X-7, which is a Martin Marietta X-24B that Kawamori named the "Ghost Valkyrie".) Macross Chronicle's a top-tier source, but there were changes and corrections to many sheets between editions.

Resources are pretty slim all around on that one... the only book I've translated that says more than a little about it is the old Sky Angels book, which is where most of the info in later publications comes from. Perhaps not directly, but the AIF-X-9 Ghost from Macross Plus is a descendant of the Northrom QF-3000E Ghost from the First Space War. It was arguably also a predecessor of the Neo Glaug drone that was also under test in 2040 (and was a boss in the Macross Plus video game edition). Volume 2 of the VF-1 Master File indicates that the Northrom QF-3000 was internally designated AIF-3, and also mentions an improved model that was developed in the late 2010s that was designated QF-3100 Ghost Kai. After the fully autonomous AIF-X-9 ended in a spectacular fiasco in 2040, the economized production version of the nextgen Ghost (the AIF-7S seen in Macross Frontier) was built with an improved version of the same semi-autonomous artificial intelligence used by the QF-3000. Yeah, the QF-3000 had some issues with its FF-1999 initial-type thermonuclear reaction turbine engine. The knowledge gained while investigating and correcting those issues also benefited the VF-X program. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-0 Phoenix gives a little detail as to how. It describes the VF-0-NF, a VF-0 outfitted with a pair of FF-1999 engines, that was used in atmospheric and space testing to evaluate the performance of a Variable Fighter with thermonuclear reaction turbine engines. (This apparently later led to the VF-0+, a VF-0 updated with the same FF-2001 engines used by the VF-1A.) Yeah, the initial generation of OTM-based AI computers were a little flaky so the QF-3000 was a semi-autonomous unmanned fighter. None before, though it's said that the vast majority of QF-3000s saw combat exactly once... in the battle with the Boddole Main Fleet in 2010. Of the 1,500 produced, less than 100 survived that engagement. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Battroid Valkyrie suggests that the 20 or so remaining Ghosts that the SDF-1 Macross had access to after its defold at Pluto's orbit did pretty well for themselves against the Vrlitwhai branch fleet and suffered only about 50% losses in the entire flight to Mars.

Considering he can't be much over 50 in Macross Frontier, it's a damned impressive resume regardless. The Macross Frontier novelization makes him out to be one of Ozma's old COs from the time he spent in the NUNS prior to the 117th Research Fleet incident, which implicitly further ups his badassery level by suggesting he was Earth/Federal NUNS before going off to join a PMC. Not so much, no. That only came up in connection with my correction of the rank table in the thread's first post by @DWN013. The rank table in question incorrectly presented the rank of Junshō - the word used for foreign "one star" flag officer ranks - as equivalent to the US Navy's usage of "Commodore" as an honorary title held by a senior captain. The best equivalent term for the US Navy's title of "Commodore" is Teitoku. Basically, it was the American English version of the Captain (title) vs. Captain (rank) conundrum that often crops up when translating Japanese into English. On the contrary, we're 100% certain that military structure was changed at least twice in the wake of the First Space War. The first time was when the New Unification Government was established after the First Space War in 2010, and the second was the governmental and military reforms that came out of the Second Unification War. This isn't really about in-universe changes or whether or not it's consistent between shows, though. The actual bone of contention in this discussion is the allegation that the ranks in Macross media being consistently translated as Army-style (or Air Force-style) ranks both in-series and out since the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series is a result of a systematic bias towards the use of Army ranks in the Japanese-to-English translation process, and the related assertion that the Spacy's ranks should actually be translated as Navy ones since it operates a space fleet. (It's worth noting that the general idea that a bias exists is not entirely unreasonable, as the alleged bias can actually be demonstrated in the handiwork of machine translators like Google Translate and Babelfish. Those systems tend to pick whatever the first dictionary definition because their ability to detect context is limited or nonexistent.)

That could get messy. Is the novel Darth Plagueis still canon-ish? From what I've read, he was kind of a high-functioning psychopath from a very young age.

According to Vol.3 of the Macross Frontier audio dramas, Colonel Jeffrey Wilder was a lifer in the New UN Spacy with a frankly impressive resume as a variable fighter pilot until some unspecified life event drove him to leave the military and join Strategic Military Services. (It may or may not have been his wife leaving him.) He is, however, acknowledged to be an avid enthusiast of water sports in his free time with a particular passion for surfing. What he's doing in that scene is using the Macross Quarter's Storming Attack mode to surf a piece of armor down into the atmosphere of the Vajra planet. Given his acknowledged passion for the sea in his off time, it wouldn't be surprising if he had boating experience as well. (Getting assigned to an emigrant fleet that had large simulated bodies of water must've been a dream come true for him.) Macross Frontier character designer Risa Ebata did acknowledge in interviews that the visual theme they went for when designing Jeffrey Wilder was that of a "pirate" and a "man of the sea", which is apparently why Kawamori insisted on the goggles he wears over his duty uniform. His passion for surfing was apparently determined early on but not properly touched on until the second movie. More like his hobby. They touch on his past career in the Macross Frontier audio dramas, and as a New UN Spacy fighter pilot he supposedly flew an impressive array of VFs over the years including the VF-1, VF-4, VF-11, VF-17, VF-19, and VF-171.

Considering it's Rebecca Forstadt's tone-deaf caterwauling, the only thing I would say it could inspire would be suicide... or perhaps murder, whatever it takes to stop the Most Annoying Sound. (Seriously, it's like listening to someone insert a barbed-wire buttplug into a hungover cockatiel.) Ah, no... just as in the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross version, the lolicon trio are pretty freaking stoked when they hear they're being delivered to their objective by none other than top ace [Milia/Miriya]. The ONLY hostility ever displayed was between the commanders, which was pretty much entirely work related. [Quamzin/Khyron] was PO'd because [Laplamiz/Azonia] put him on the shortest of short leashes to make him behave, and [Vrlitwhai/Breetai] was a bit snippy because she took his job and it took him a fair bit of political maneuvering to get it back (with interest) from their mutual boss. Zentradi men and women are segregated, but not mutually hostile. Mutually hostile was only a thing in DYRL?.

The official Macross timelines have always maintained that the Earth Unification Forces were originally created with four branches of service (Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines) in 2001 and that the Spacy was a late addition two years later. The biographical summary from Isamu's personnel file that Guld accesses in Macross Plus mentions that Isamu's (involuntary) reassignments took him to a UN Navy posting aboard the carrier Enterprise (in 2035) and a UN Air Force posting on planet Iota (in 2039) in addition to his service in various UN Spacy postings. Macross Plus's official artbooks also made explicit references to the existence of the UN Spacy Air Force and UN Spacy Marine Corps after the First Space War ended. So the only technically unaccounted-for ones would be the UN Army and UN Marine Corps, and it seems relatively safe to assume that the miclone infantry and tanks we've seen are probably the regular Army. Some of the technical write-ups of VFs also mention branch-specific variants of postwar VFs like the UN Navy's VF-4D and VF-4S. Macross's animation focuses overwhelmingly on the Spacy, so we haven't really gotten a chance to dig into the rest of the armed forces in detail. In Macross II, there definitely seem to still be five branches of the UN Forces c.2092. We know that two of the uniform variants explicitly belong to the Spacy (black) and Army (khaki), and there were a few other variants like blue and green. Given Isamu's experience of being shuffled around to different branches of service without loss of rank depending on where his latest fed-up CO could dump him, I would surmise that the branches of the New Unification Forces are likely not as separate as we Americans would be predisposed to think. The way Isamu does it, it almost sounds like the branch affiliation is more indicative of where you're assigned. EDIT: I mean this mainly in the physical location sense. If you're in space and they attach you to a fleet it's a Spacy assignment, where manning static defenses might be a Spacy Air Force job or being assigned to an orbit-to-surface assault unit would land you in the Spacy Marines. I would assume both are likely combatant commands under the Spacy, and that the non-Spacy forces probably aren't very large.

It's not that much different from what was used in the Robotech TV series. If you recall, the little ditty that Robotech used to replace the classic love song "Ai wa nagareru" from the original Macross series was "We will win"... a song about winning the battle. It wouldn't exactly have evoked any foreign sentiments in the Zentradi. Also, the "hostility [with] Meltrans" thing doesn't exist in Robotech... only in Macross: Do You Remember Love?. Do you understand the mythos? He's really just Davey the Donut Boy, who blackmailed his way up the chain of command without having any actual skills. I feel like you might be confusing "understand" with "give a f*ck about". Whether they understand or not, it is clearly evident that they don't give a f*ck about it.

That's an interesting line of thought as well... Besides introducing Zentradi into the organization, the one change that really stands out is that the old UN Spacy's focus on static and semi-static orbital defenses was deemphasized by the logistical necessities of supporting the Humankind Seeding Project. The New UN Spacy needed more flexibility and long-range endurance in its ship designs, since they would have to accompany and protect emigrant ships on their long journeys across the galaxy. They needed ships that were designed to function like ships, rather than ships that were just glorified orbital weapons platforms that occasionally conducted patrols, and probably benefited a lot from the experience the Zentradi brought and the analysis of Zentradi designs. (That might be why the New UN Spacy didn't end up a "space navy"... the Zentradi influence, since they wouldn't have been familiar with blue water navy concepts.) I'd imagine General Vrlitwhai Kridanik did a lot to influence the development of the NUNS's next generation of warship designs that came into service in the 2020s and 2030s. That's when we start seeing the carrier-escort paradigm becoming the dominant formation with a lot of emphasis on stealth. I wouldn't worry too much, this was already an exceedingly broad topic involving history, linguistics, and methods of translation, and so on... You'd have to ask the guys who did the subs for Macross Delta and Macross Delta: Passionate Walkure... they were, in all likelihood, the last ones to ask and they did go in for Army or Air Force-style ranks for both Xaos and the NUNS. (Somewhat oddly, the main characters in Xaos appear to belong to an Air Force-esque organization even though they operate from a carrier. The unit affiliation is often given, in English, as Xaos Ragna 3rd Fighter Wing Delta Flight.)

The United States Air Force was only "relatively new" in its modern incarnation as a stand-alone branch of the armed forces. The original incarnation of what eventually evolved into the USAF - the US Army Signal Corps, Aeronautics Division - was founded and flying in 1907. That's three years before the US Navy first experimented with aviation in 1910, and 14 years before the Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics was founded as a formal organization for naval aviation. The Signal Corps Aeronautics Division ended up reorganized into the Aviation Division in 1914, and then into an independent branch of the war department as the US Air Service back in 1918 (three years before the Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics was founded, if we're still counting). It was rolled into the US Army as the US Army Air Service with the National Defense Act of 1920, and was renamed several times thereafter. Its name got changed to the US Army Air Corps in 1926, then the US Army Air Forces in 1941, and finally became the independent US Air Force branch in 1947 under the National Defense Act of 1947. So, if we're being historically accurate, technically the Air Force was flying planes before the Navy was and formalized its military aviation organization over a decade earlier than the Navy did. The Navy only looks like it has a longer aviation tradition becuase they were less impacted by congress's inability to decide who should have administrative control over military aviation until the military potential of aircraft became too big of a thing to ignore. (If you're wondering why I know this esoteric history, one of my part-time jobs as a callow youth was at the Greenfield Village history museum, where I occasionally pulled presenter duty in the Wright Brothers cycle shop. The Navy's first hesitant step towards naval aviation was observing a Wright brothers test flight in 1908 in Fort Myer, VA.)

One thing it occurred to me to add, with respect to the UN Spacy having operational similarities to an Army Air Force, is that the UN Spacy fleet as it existed during the First Space War was developed and operated less as a fleet than as static orbital defenses. For instance, the ARMD-class space carriers were actually developed to be stationary space airbases situated in various orbits as part of Earth's planetary defenses. The idea to modify the design into a warship came after they'd already built at least one as the original design-intent space station: the L5 Frontline Station. The Oberth-class destroyers were designed as ships from the start, but the actual function of that basic, no-frills design is essentially a space-based ballistic missile silo. They park in orbit with the missile silos pointing outward and let rip if they're given a target. Is it, though? Most of its uses are kinda cringy these days. The only one that really gets taken seriously anymore is "Cyberpunk". Some terms like "cyberspace" are dated enough to be instantly associated with the 90's. (and I say that as a guy who has a degree in what used to be called "cybersecurity").

As far as I know, it's just an attempt to make an intelligible English word out of the kanji for "Space Forces" (宇宙軍) following the same pattern used in the kanji for "Army" (陸軍) and "Navy" (海軍). The other two end in -y in English, so if the Ground Forces are the Army and the Sea Forces are the Navy, then the space forces would be the Spacy/Spacey. Macross's creators have come up with a couple terms like that which unintentionally sound a bit silly in English, like the name the Unification Government gave to the alien starship that crashed in 1999. They called it Alien StarShip One... or ASS-1 for short. "Cosmo" is one of those prefixes like "Cyber" that just feels incredibly dated these days.

The Star Wars movie I want to see is the one where the Galactic Empire's human resources people try to send Darth Vader to take an anger management class in a vain hope that they can get him to stop using his space magic to murder his direct reports every time he's given bad news. I like to think the Imperial forces have their own version of the Peter Principle called the Vader Principle... that the most ambitious, least competent officers are systematically promoted to the place where they have the least opportunity to damage Imperial interests: the bridge of Lord Vader's flagship.

If they weren't clearly trying to take this mess seriously, this would be a god-tier work of self-parody by the Robotech franchise.

A lot of it is actually modeled on the United States Armed Forces... distinctly Japanese touches are surprisingly thin on the ground in the organization of the [New] UN Forces. The ability to transfer between branches without having to be discharged and reenlist is one of those distinctly Japanese touches, though the only officer we've seen do it is Isamu... and he doesn't appear to have been doing it voluntarily, being kicked around from the UN Spacy to the UN Navy, UN Air Force, and back to the UN Spacy over the course of a few years in the 2030s. So... the military ranks used in the Macross anime are the old school terms that were used by the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy until Japan's military was formally dissolved under Article 9 of the Japanese constitution, and are now only used to address foreign soldiers. Nowadays, the JSDF's three branches each have unique terms that incorporate the kanji for their operating regime ("Land", "Sea", and "Sky" respectively). The old system used the same words regardless of branch except where it was prefaced by the name of the branch as an additional word. If a pilot were to transfer from the Maritime Self-Defense Force to the Air Self-Defense Force, he wouldn't be demoted but the rank term used to refer to him would change. The Japanese Self-Defense Force's three branches are organized as distinct commands united at the highest levels. Each of the JSDF's three branches has its own Chief of Staff: Chief of the Ground Staff, the head of the Ground Self-Defense Force Chief of the Air Staff, the head of the Air Self-Defense Force Chief of the Maritime Staff, the head of the Maritime Self-Defense Force They collectively answer to the Chief of Staff of the Joint Staff and his deputies, the Vice-Chief of Staff of the Joint Staff, the Administrative Vice-Chief of Staff of the Joint Staff, and a senior enlisted adviser. The Chief of Staff of the Joint Staff in turn answers to the Defense Minister (and his deputies) and the Prime Minister who acts as Commander in Chief of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces. That said, there are a number of joint organizations in the JSDF that are staffed by a mixture of personnel from multiple branches administrated by the Joint Staff like the Regional Cooperation Headquarters, the SDF hospital network, and SDF Physical Education School. And f*cking proud of it.

Yeah, 宇宙軍 is what I was thinking of. There is a very slight etymological bias towards army in a stringently literal "Definition #1" rendering of the term itself, but "space army" sounds goofy as f*ck and I can't think of any translator who'd actually want to use that interpretation. An army is something intrinsically associated with land warfare, so to most a "space army" is a contradiction in terms. That kind of gels with the kanji actually used for "Army" (陸軍, literally "ground troops" or "ground forces") and "Navy" (海軍, literally "sea troops" or "sea forces"). The only reason that a "space navy" doesn't cause the same kind of cognitive dissonance as "space army" is because we've been conditioned to accept it by popular fiction's overwhelming bias toward the Navy organizational model for a space fleet. Write "space navy" in Japanese (宇宙海軍) and it looks every bit as wrong as it should sound in English. My personal preference has always been for the Navy organizational model. Because I was raised on Star Trek, that style has always felt more natural to me and it took a while to really get my head around the idea that a modern space fleet would fall under the administrative jurisdiction of the Air Force. With so much evidence that the ranks are meant to be translated as Army ones thanks to English text visible in the animation itself, info from liner notes, katakana spellings of ranks like the names of the Macross-class SDFNs, and official subtitles produced in Japan under the supervision of Macross's creative staff, my preferences have to take a back seat.

That is your personal feeling, not a hard fact. Frankly, I know a number of Navy personnel (some of them relatives) who would jump at the chance to serve on a spaceship regardless of what it entailed. I think the UN Government and UN Forces felt a former submariner was an ideal choice for command of a starship since they were more accustomed to three-dimensional thinking and being confined to a huge metal pressure vessel for long periods of time. The entire structure of traditional militaries had been turned on its ear already, so who was going to argue? This isn't applying Occam's Razor. The explanation with the fewest assumptions is that the mountain of consistent evidence we've been given over three decades is correct and the ranks are supposed to be translated as Army ranks. The Japanese term used doesn't say "Space Navy", it says "Space Army" or "Space Military". Moreover, why would we automatically assume that a space force with its own fleet would be organized along Navy lines? There's no rule saying it has to be, and realistically we know that space operations are the jurisdiction of the Air Force. The established trope we've got about "space navies" is a product of authors who had no concept of how space travel worked and wanted an easy analogy ("space is an ocean") or were lavishing affection on their personal obsessions (like Gene Roddenberry's affection for CV-6). The use of Naval ranks is often the only part of them that's recognizably Navy-inspired unless you go to into the hardcore military fiction. Realistically, you'd end up with something that's a good deal like the UN Spacy... a blending of whatever traditions and practices works for the situation, and to hell with where it came from, mixing Army and Navy traditions from multiple countries. The entire concept of "the death of the author" is academically cretinous at best... amounting as it does to a way to say "screw the evidence, I'm not wrong because I don't want to be". To pretend that there is nothing of the author's thought in his work is denial of the most basic nature of authorship.

So remember... regularly sand and repaint your old sailors to prevent corrosion damage! Y'see, I'm not so sure that this alleged Army bias in translation is actually a thing outside of machine translations and inexperienced translators. Both of those groups have a well-known tendency to default to whatever's the first definition in the dictionary for simplicity's sake or because they don't know any better. Experienced translators know to look for contextual cues that point them to a more correct translation. Sometimes these cues are flying out in plain sight, and sometimes you have to dig. Mind you, given the state of popular space fiction we would actually expect the opposite of your contention. Namely, a strong bias towards the use of Navy rank systems for most any work featuring starships or space fighters. Why? The most popular, mainstream works of space fleet-featuring science fiction in the US and in Japan prominently feature their space fleets organized as space navies. Star Trek has the Federation Starfleet organized as a space navy that borrows pretty much exclusively from US maritime tradition. The Star Wars universe has the Galactic Empire's starfleet literally called the Imperial Navy. Japan has Space Battleship Yamato, wherein the space fleet is a space navy. They've also got the Earth Federation Space Force of the Gundam franchise's Universal Century that's presented as a space navy. There are more examples of "Space Marines" than one can shake an entire forest's worth of sticks at. The overwhelming bias is towards Navy organization in fiction, not Army. Here's the thing... Macross's history is supposed to be essentially the same as ours up to 17 July 1999 0030 JST, when an intense energetic phenomenon (later known to be a defold reaction) is detected at lunar orbit followed by the detection of an object of significant mass on a collision course with Earth. Macross's creators have gone back and corrected their timeline several times over the years to account for events that occurred in the real world like the fall of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany. You'll find old timelines from artbooks like Macross: Perfect Memory make reference to West Germany and the Soviet Union still existing in the early 2000s. When the newly formed Earth UN Government established the UN Forces in February 2001, the four branches of service were mergers of the various Armies, Air Forces, Navies, and Marine Corps maintained by the nations which joined the Earth UN Government. The US's fingerprints are all over the UN Forces in practically every known aspect of their organization to date. When the government finally put together a dedicated Space branch of the armed forces, it was a slam dunk that it was going to be heavily influenced by the US's approach to space defense. Now, which branch has been in charge of military operations in space since the 1960s? The United States Air Force. They staked their claim early on, with the Blue Gemini project proposal and held onto it with a death grip ever since, even if the Outer Space Treaty in '67 kind of took the wind out of their sails. It would not be remotely surprising for the UN Government to round up all those Air Force guys who were part of the space commands of the various national air forces and say "you're a space force now, start figuring it out". Even in Star Trek, the Federation Starfleet's predecessor United Earth Starfleet was an outgrowth of the United Earth Space Probe Agency, a merger of the various national space agencies and space commands of pre-unity Earth. Likewise, Stargate was a fictional universe that hewed closely to our own history and are one of the few to depict a US-owned space fleet correctly as belonging to the Air Force. This chart is incorrect from O-7 (NATO OF-6) up... or should I say down given its directionality? Specifically, there appears to have been an offset introduced when the US Navy's version of "Commodore" was included... resulting in incorrect ranks in Japanese being given for the flag officers. A correct version of the chart would look like this, which I knocked together in Google Sheets real quick: You'll notice I've marked NATO grade OF-6 (US O-7) in RED. Japan's old Imperial Army and Navy, as well as the modern Japanese Self-Defense Force, don't actually have a rank in their organization corresponding to OF-6 (US O-7). They skip right from OF-5 to OF-7, which I've seen hints was something they might've picked up from the French via cultural osmosis or deliberate imitation. For parity with NATO forces, the Japanese flag officers treat their NATO grade as one lower than on this chart due to the absence of an actual OF-6 equivalent in their organization. Junshō is a rank, not a title, and thus is equivalent to what would be called Brigadier General, Rear Admiral Lower Half, or the rank of Commodore used by two dozen or so navies outside the US. (Gensui would typically be rendered as "Marshal" or "Field Marshal" in a Japanese context.) The title of Commodore as it is applied in the United States Navy is a title independent of rank held by the senior captain in a group of ship's captains who commands the group. I believe the equivalent term for the title of Commodore would be Teitoku (提督). Bruno J. Global's rank is given as Junshō in the dialog of Super Dimension Fortress Macross and Macross: Do You Remember Love?. It's not his title, it's his rank. There are more examples than can be readily counted, to be honest. I'd actually forgotten another one - a cluster example - where the personnel profiles of half a dozen characters are on screen simultaneously and we see that all of them have bios in conspicuous English with legible ranks and vital statistics in Macross Delta: Second Lieutenant Sara Korat First Lieutenant Hilma Sandra Captain Hadley Fuller Second Lieutenant Attilio Missillier First Lieutenant Samuel Murdoch Captain Kuzma Sirotenko Quite honestly, I think the simplest explanation given that other two major Japanese sci-fi anime properties (Yamato and Gundam) are both all-Navy all the time is that this was done intentionally. The creators of the original Macross series were Gundam fanboys, and at least one of them (Kawamori) is a dyed-in-the-wool military aviation enthusiast. For them not to know the difference would be surprising to say the least. I don't think there's really a cogent case for "it's all accidental" when they've been so incredibly consistent about it over three and a half decades of material. I mean, we have at least five cases where Macross shows were subtitled with the direct or indirect cooperation of Macross's creators: Macross II: Lovers Again, Super Dimension Fortress Macross (Animeigo release, 2001), the Macross Frontier 30th anniversary Blu-ray set, Macross Delta, and Macross Delta: Passionate Walkure. On each occasion, the ranks are translated as Army ranks. Literally Army ranks in the case of Super Dimension Fortress Macross, since that was the only one to feature enlisted ranks rather than having every pilot depicted as an officer. US Renditions even had to account for the potential confusion stemming from having a character whose rank was Captain (Taii) in scenes alongside a character whose title is Captain (Kanchō), which was resolved by the dub giving Cpt. Nex Gilbert an informal promotion to Major. There are, to the best of my knowledge, only two instances of Navy rank terminology showing up in Macross. The first was the Viz Media translation of the Macross II: Lovers Again manga, which contained a number of errors including accidentally substituting Navy ranks in and referring to Nex as "Lieutenant" and Sylvie as "Sublieutenant". The second is a blink-and-you'll-miss-it thing in Macross Zero, wherein a handful of aircraft are shown with Navy ranks stenciled on the canopy frame. Poor LCDR Tim Baker dies like five times in the OVA thanks to being the name stenciled on the default VF-0A CG model's skin. Shin Kudo's F-14A++ Super Tomcat has his and Edgar's canopy stencils reading "LT SHIN KUDO" and "LT EDGAR LA SALLE". Later on in the OVA, the characters who are confirmed to belong to the UN Spacy at that point have no rank on their canopy stencil, only a "PL" followed by their name. We know Shin and Edgar served aboard the UN Navy's carrier Illustria prior to being dragooned into flying for Roy in the UN Spacy, and that Roy was essentially leading a model conversion training class to train pilots on the variable system prior to adoption of the VF-1. It's possible the unfortunate Lt. Commander Baker was one of the UN Navy's future trainers operating in Roy's ad hoc squadron aboard the Asuka II. You knew it was coming, so here it is... THE CATCH. We know Kawamori's a big aviation enthusiast who loves naval aviation. The UN Spacy's SVF-1 Skulls are his homage to the US Navy's (then VF-84) Jolly Rogers. This ain't news. However, Miyatake made some interesting Army-themed design choices for UN Spacy and Zentradi gear... a few of which I alluded to previously. If you examine the bodies of the destroids whose markings identify them as UN Spacy units, you'll find US Army-style bumper numbers and US Army World War II-vintage formation markings. That's what the Δ#Δ and several other numerical markings are. Division and Company affiliations, presented Army style. Curiously, the closest to a conventional aircraft carrier the Zentradi have - the Quiltra Queleual-class - is explicitly called out not as an aircraft carrier, but as an LST. Yes, they even helpfully wrote out "Landing Ship Tank" in English. As a point of order, the VF-1 Valkyrie was never exclusive to the UN Spacy. Navy-specific features like the nose landing gear configuration with catapult shuttle launch bars is a touch intended to accommodate users like the UN Navy and UN Marine Corps. We've seen, officially, units from three different branches of service with VF-1s (the UN Spacy, UN Navy, and UN Spacy Air Force), and it's indicated to have also been used by the UN Air Force and UN Marine Corps. The VF-1 was like the F-35... just, y'know, not bad. It was one fighter to rule them all, and by all accounts it was pretty damn good at it thanks to overtechnology. The same holds true for the models that followed, and even the one that preceded it. The VF-0 is one of the few VFs I know of to have a variant commissioned for a specific branch of service: the VF-0C was built for the UN Marine Corps, and the sole known user was VMFAT-203. This is actually something Variable Fighter Master File got from official sources. You'll find references to UN Spacy fighter squadrons using a modified version of the Navy-style squadron designation all the way back in the earliest art books like Sky Angels. The Air Force and Spacy Air Force use USAF-style markings and designations, while the Navy and Spacy use the Navy-style and modified Navy-style markings and designations, and the Marines and Spacy Marines use modified USMC-style markings and designations. The other overtly-Navy organizational touch we see is that the ships use US Navy-inspired (or directly lifted) hull classification symbols most of the time. Please note that my contention is not, and has never been, that there are not Navy-inspired touches present in the UN Spacy and New UN Spacy. Only that all evidence indicates that this space force uses Army-style ranks for its personnel. Amusingly enough, that is not consistently applied. If you look, in the Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series everyone has three stripes on their sleeve regardless of their rank. Visible rank markings weren't applied to character designs until Macross: Do You Remember Love?. The main rank markings were on the right side of the chest, though they did also have sleeve stripes that correctly line up to their rank. Macross II: Lovers Again carried this practice forward, but it went away in Macross Plus only to come back again in Macross 7, was inconsistently applied in Frontier (Cathy Glass's are correct, Leon's are not), and seems to have been abandoned again in Macross Delta. Again, more Army Air Force than straight Air Force... after all, the UN Spacy spun off an Air Force. Battroids are explicitly infantry units, and refer to the previous remarks about how UN Spacy destroids have US Army style armored vehicle unit markings. "FAST Pack" itself is an Air Force term coined for the F-15 if memory serves. They also explicitly indicate that the translation for shotai is "Platoon", an infantry term. More subtle nods to Air Force and Army Air Corps stuff are EVERYWHERE in Macross though. The VF-1 Valkyrie is named for a USAF Strategic Air Command prototype bomber (the XB-70) and Hikaru has a model of said bomber on display in his quarters. The next three main fighters are all named for USAF and USAAF aircraft as well: the P-38 Lightning, P-47 Thunderbolt, and F-117 Nighthawk. The VF-1's manufacturers are bland name versions of companies known for producing aircraft and concept aerospace craft for the USAF and NASA: Rockwell International (AKA "Stonewell") and Bell Aerospace (AKA "Bellcom"). Other contributing companies are similarly Air Force-heavy. The QF-3000E Ghost's design is based on the USAF/NASA X-24A built by Martin Marietta. Roy's signature stunt plane was a Focker D.VII. Many of the character names reference aviation and particularly aces of various Army air services like aerial maneuver-inventor Max Immelmann (Max Jenius, who is also a nod to the "Blue Max" medal he won), high-scoring ace and general scumbag Hans-Ulrich Rudel (Bruce Rudel), Eddie Rickenbacker and Eino Juutilainen (Eddie Juutilainen), and so on. Macross Delta took this to an obscene extreme. I could go on like this for entirely too long, but I think you get the idea. Kawamori might've had Navy inspiration for a few things, but the Air Forces are all over the place. For the record, Alto Saotome is 17 as of the start of Macross Frontier. The UN Government and the New UN Government that replaced it after the First Space War apparently set the age of legal majority at 17 based on explicit dialog references in Macross Frontier. Alto's initial rank is an odd, but not entirely unprecedented case that is trope excessively abused by mecha anime over the last twenty or so years. Namely, in the rare instance that an officer trainee is assigned to field duty prior to the conclusion of their training they are sometimes given the provisional rank of Warrant Officer (Jun'i). Anime f*cking loves abusing this, because that way they can have young characters who only just joined the armed forces end up as officers very quickly by merit-based promotion. This goes back as far as the series Fang of the Sun Dougram but wasn't really flogged for all it's worth until the 2000s with shows like Macross Frontier. (I can only think of two cases where the rank is actually used in the way it's intended... Vato Falman in Fullmetal Alchemist, a man of indeterminate age who was at least in his mid-20s or early 30's and was promoted to 2nd Lieutenant partway through the series, and Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion, wherein Suzaku Kururugi goes straight from a second-class citizen buck private meat shield to warrant officer in one fell swoop thanks to the patronage of Earl Lloyd Asplund and Princess Euphemia before being promoted directly to Major upon being knighted.) The current batch of writers, certainly... but the people overseeing it all are acknowledged to have a fair amount of actual understanding of how the military works. They're not ex-military, but they are what you might call military enthusiasts. Kawamori in particular is a military aviation enthusiast with a love of American military aviation. It would be ridiculous if he wasn't aware of the distinction. Moreover, he broke with Gundam and Yamato by using Army ranks rather than Navy ones. Surely it would have been easier for him to simply follow suit. Since there's a limit on the number of quote blocks, I'll split this post.

Yeah, that's a long one. The museum staff are making pretty good progress on the restoration work, considering how bizarrely out-of-the-way the USS Edson's dock is. As a donor I got to sneak into a number of parts of the ship that aren't quite safe for the regular visitors. I'm hoping the restoration work will be done in the next few years, though the upkeep on a thing like that has to be brutal. The next big item is they definitely need to strip the deck and repaint it. Michigan winters are NOT kind. (I did have a grand time watching my brother, who's never been on a military vessel of any kind, find every exposed conduit, steam pipe, and doorframe with his head. I'm almost 2m tall myself but I've long since learned where to duck.)

It's Robotech. Nobody thought it couldn't get worse. Getting worse is what Robotech does, and it has become exceedingly efficient at it.

The studio must be a believer in "if you build it, they will come". A cynic might suspect that they deliberately trotted out that sh*t-awful mess so the negative reaction would get everyone's attention and lower expectations for the final product.

Pages 18 and 19.

None, I'm afraid. It seems to exist only as a textual mention in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-25 Messiah's description of the VF-25's development. The only non-VF-25 pictures in that section of the book are of the YF-24-2, a VF-19F and VF-22S with NUNS markings, a YF-29 (incl. a version in SW-XA II colors), and a VF-27 in plain NUNS heraldry. (I saw that pic on DeviantArt... looks like a frigging Arwing from Star Fox. The other fun one that turned up on a Google Image search for YF-26 was the YF-27-5 Shahar-F from Macross the Ride misidentified as "YF-26 Seraphim".)