Seto Kaiba
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We've had very little information about the rest of the Unification Government's military and civilian spacecraft outside the emigrant fleets. Several (New) UN Spacy Special Forces units have appeared in various Macross video games... like the Dancing Skulls in Macross M3, the 727th Independent Special Command "Ravens" in Macross VF-X2, or Havamal in Macross 30. We've had a few details here and there in Frontier-related titles regarding interstellar commerce and shipping. Strategic Military Services (SMS) was originally founded as a protection detail for its parent company's (Bilra Transport Co.'s) interstellar shipping. Other, similar, shipping concerns are mentioned in connection with Macross the Ride as sponsors of Vanquish races. Macross Delta's pilot was the first time we've actually seen a cargo ship though... which seem to be essentially a spacecraft version of an eighteen wheeler lugging around surprisingly conventional-looking shipping containers of produce (and presumably other stuff). Research-wise, we've seen two research groups... both exceptionally ill-fated. The first was in Macross 7 PLUS episode "Spiritia Dreaming", where the Varauta research/survey fleet was shown deploying to investigate the ruins that turned out to be where the Protodeviln were sealed away. The second was the 117th Research Fleet, which was centered around the SDFN-04, and met its end at the hands of a Vajra swarm. The novelization of Macross Frontier suggests that some research fleets have been funded by private companies, with the 117th being funded by Macross VF-X2 villains Critical Path Corp. Passenger ships are another vague area. We've not heard anything about civilian corporations operating them, but we've seen a total of three different examples of passenger ships. The first was in Macross II: Lovers Again, and was a civilian shuttle that was apparently analogous to a jet airliner (with restraints that look right off a roller coaster) that traveled to and from the moon. In the Macross Plus OVA we saw the Stellar Whale-class passenger ship, which was something more along the lines of a cruise liner built for space and which Myung and her colleagues took to get from Eden to Earth. The third was the OGL Galaxy Starliners from Macross Frontier, which returned to the jet airliner style, but with a fold system. I don't believe the YF-19 or YF-21 are explicitly modeling their paint jobs on real-world fighter squadron paint schemes. At present, no Valkyrie has true independent fold capability... meaning that they don't actually possess an internal fold system. The earliest model fighter known to have been outfitted with an external fold system (fold booster) was a VF-X-11 prototype which was stolen by Zentradi deserters in November 2030. Project Super Nova's Advanced Variable Fighter prototypes were the first to have native support for fold boosters rather than having it patched in with avionics upgrades later on (like the VF-11, VF-17, etc.).
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At the very least, he appears to be familiar with its R******* equivalent. He did mention the Spartas hover tank in his original post, though it's funny that he'd cite the adaptation where it was considered a rubbish mecha like the other failed transformable tanks.
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*sigh* This sh*t again... For starters, I have no idea where you're getting those designations for the City Police patroids... because the official publications which cover them most assuredly don't even give them proper names, let alone designations. As far as the performance of the flying and armored car patroids, the official publications don't agree with your contention. Their coverage in Macross Chronicle says nothing of their cost, and notes that they were adequate at maintaining public order inside of City-7 when dealing with civilians, but were completely unequal to the task of protecting City-7 from attack and suffered significant losses against enemy VFs. As the Octos was inferior in most respects to a traditional Destroid and most definitely inferior to a Valkyrie, there wasn't really any incentive to bother trying to economize it... particularly as the focus of military procurement had been on space-oriented planetary defense. As the Octos was not suited to space operations, and the far cheaper conventional Destroids outclassed the Octos as a land warfare weapon, large-scale production of the Octos would've been a waste of resources on a mecha that was less effective than practically every other option. It was, to be blunt, crippled by its overspecialization. So... now would be a real bad time to point out that the Octos is substantially larger than the ADR-03-Mk.III Cheyenne and Series 04 Destroids of the First Space War? The Octos stood 11.2m tall and was a good 15m+ long in its ground warfare mode... the Cheyenne was smaller in all respects, and the Series 04 Destroids were comparably tall but significantly less long-bodied. The Octos is large, but its footprint on the ground is small and its weight is excessive, meaning the ground pressure will be much greater than a Cheyenne or Series 04 destroid's, meaning it will be less stable and more likely to get bogged down in soft terrain. (There is a REASON that Destroids have such large, flat feet.) Really, pretty much every supposed advantage you're trying to attach to the Octos doesn't stand up under even a casual analysis. The VA-3M was not the first underwater-capable VF... all of them have had some underwater capability, starting from the VF-0, as a consequence of the technology used in the engines and the structural design for aerospace operations. The VA-3M was simply the first variable aircraft purpose-built for aquatic operations. Unlike the Octos, the VA-3M can fight in the air, on land, and underwater, and can boost to at least a low orbit for recovery... while Octos units would need a spacecraft to land and recover them. The Octos may be cheaper than a VA-3M, but it's also a lot less versatile and effective. Nope. We see infantry in a few different Macross titles, but the reality is always the same... they are rear-echelon security, not a front-line combat force. They guard installations and VIPs, but the bulk of the actual fighting is done by Valkyries and other mobile weapons. Targeting joints or sensors will only work if the weapons are sufficiently powerful to get through the armor protecting them... armor material is several orders of magnitude more durable in Macross than the real world. The blast from a warhead powerful enough to penetrate the OTM composite armor of a Destroid would very likely kill anyone in the ground within several dozen yards. The Zentradi Marines don't really count, as on foot they're equivalent to a battroid and they're usually deployed in their own mecha. No speed is given for the Cheyenne or Cheyenne II using rollers in Macross Chronicle or any other official publication that we have. Its rollers were considered advantageous because they helped it move across the hull of a ship more effectively than magnetic walking, and didn't mess up the pavement inside the city ships.
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"Widely used" may be a bit of a stretch... we don't actually know how widespread the deployment of the Cheyenne II is, but it is well worth noting that Destroids basically disappeared from military service for twenty or thirty years before a new model emerged. The battlefield role they occupy has shrunk significantly as well, to the extent that they're no longer front-line combat mecha... their fleet role has been almost totally eradicated by static defense turrets. It's true that we've had two units of transforming ground mecha... but it is also true that the Octos and City-7 police patroid were not widely used or produced in large numbers. They couldn't match the all-purposefulness of the Valkyrie or the cost-effectiveness of a conventional Destroid. We haven't seen any transforming tanks because there is no practical advantage to a transforming tank in the Macross setting. You would have two different modes that are for the exact same purpose. Transformation in Macross (and, really, most other mecha shows) is used so that a mecha can operate in a different operational role in each mode... like the Valkyrie being a fighter jet, an attack helicopter substitute, and a combat robot, or the Octos being a submarine and a land warfare robot. Actually, the VA-3M Invader makes a reasonable amount of sense... the thermonuclear reaction engines of a Variable Fighter use MHD systems for space propulsion, and that same technology can also be used to power boats and submarines. All VFs can be operated underwater, so making a VF that was optimized for underwater operation is a logical step that eliminates the need for a dedicated submarine mecha. Where are there Zentradi in Macross Zero? Oh that's right... NOWHERE. Infantry is useless against the Zentradi, being the infantry don't carry weapons big enough to hurt a giant that can live through being shot with a 55mm armor-piercing cannon. The infantry in Macross Zero are only viable because the war was being fought between humans on Earth prior to first contact with the Zentradi. Even then, they're basically window dressing once the giant robots start to fight. So far, we have not seen any evidence that weapons that infantry can carry can hurt something armored as heavily as a Valkyrie or Destroid. We saw Gilliam using a linear rifle against a Vajra that had armor roughly equivalent to a VF-25, and all it did was ricochet everywhere without doing any damage. If we look to some of the old data, a Valkyrie or Destroid have armor equivalent to at least three meters of steel armor plate, or about triple the heaviest armor of a main battle tank. That's not armor that infantry weapons are going to get through without being so powerful that they could kill or severely wound the firer too. (The warheads of the missiles are equivalent to a 1,000lb bomb's explosive filler... and it usually takes two or three to get through a Valkyrie or Destroid's armor.) It means that only a tiny fraction of Octos units had energy conversion armor, and only after they weren't being used in combat. The Octos models that actually fought in the UN Wars were using composite armor and weren't as well-protected as a Space War 1-era Destroid. The Macross Mecha Manual is what you'd call a "living document", in that it's constantly being revised and updated by myself and Mr March as translations of new material are made available by myself and the other translators on MacrossWorld. They were outnumbered and ambushed, so it's not surprising they didn't fare well... but the Octos didn't exactly fare well itself when it had to fight the VF-0's. The difference being that the Defender, Phalanx, Spartan, and Monster can operate on land, underwater (to limited depths), and in space... whereas the Octos is only viable in combat underwater and at the coast. They built a handful... not enough to actually matter, and of course they never saw combat in the First Space War. Unlikely! The Daedalus was a heavily-armored ship, and we see in Macross the First that submarine attacks don't actually do enough damage to be a serious threat to it. In Macross VF-X2? That's no Destroid, that's a VB-6 Konig Monster... a Variable Bomber. There were some conventional tanks shown, but they were... well... ineffective as hell against a VF. The Cheyenne II is not new, it's an upgraded version of a Destroid design that is 51 years old as of Macross Frontier. The Super Defender from Macross the Ride is also five decades old. Which a Valkyrie is infinitely more suited to attacking, because they can freely maneuver in space... unlike a Destroid or a tank. (Even in Gundam, the D-50C Loto was not nearly as capable in space as a conventional mobile suit.) The whole point of Destroids is that they're cheap and can be deployed in large numbers where numbers matter most. Poor emigrant planets do use inexpensive Valkyries like the VF-9 Cutlass or VF-5000 Star Mirage, but those fighters still have all of the versatility of the Variable Fighter design. They can be aerospace fighter jets, attack helicopter substitutes, and combat robots... while a variable tank can be a tank for land warfare or a robot for land warfare, which is redundant. Also, a planet's defenses are mostly oriented around keeping the enemy AWAY from the planet... so a Destroid on the ground isn't gone to see any action unless something goes horribly wrong. If something does go wrong, what's going to be more effective if an enemy makes it to the planet's surface? 1 variable tank, or the 10-20 Destroids you could build for the same money? You get way more firepower with the conventional Destroids. Ghosts are eating into the number of VFs being built because they cost a fraction of what a VF does... and the technology which enables a VF to rival a Ghost's performance is prohibitively expensive because it depends on a rare material that (as far as we've been told) cannot be replicated by human science.
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Apart from occasional mentions of individual emigrant fleet populations at the time of their respective shows, no... and there is apparently some significant levels of variation in size, composition, and population between emigrant fleets even in the same generation. In 2012, the Megaroad-01 emigrant fleet (1st Long-Distance Emigrant Fleet) had 25,000 people aboard the actual Megaroad-01 emigrant ship, and may have had approximately 80,000 total people counting its escort detail. The SDFN-type Macross-class ships used in the Mankind Seeding Program as escorts and advanced reconnaissance supposedly carried 10,000 emigrants. In 2037, a (pseudo-canon) colony established on Supika III by a Megaroad-class emigrant ship (fleet unknown) had a population of approximately 60,000 at the time it was destroyed by a rogue Zentradi fleet. In 2043, the Varauta 3198XE colony established by Megaroad-13 had a population of several hundred thousand when it was captured by the Protodeviln. In 2045, the Macross-7 emigrant fleet (37th Large Scale Long Distance Emigrant Fleet) had a total population of approximately 1 million, 350,000 of which were residents of the City-7, the rest of whom were living on its various support ships and In 2059, the Macross Frontier emigrant fleet (55th Large Scale Long Distance Emigrant Fleet) had a total population of approximately 10 million people, If we were to guess wildly by assuming that the various canon emigrant fleets are representative of their generations of emigrant fleet, that'd put it at above 158 million space emigrants not counting short-range fleets and the population growth resulting from settled planets.
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The OVA's director seemed to be leaning more toward the Mardook being a group of Protoculture who, like the ones from the Altira in DYRL?, decided to leg it as their civilization collapsed and start over elsewhere... but were less peaceful about their plans for after. -
... you're... not following what I'm saying, eh? The human (and Zentradi) colonists who colonized the Varauta system half a million years after the Protodeviln were sealed away had no idea that there was an apocalyptically-powerful collection of possessed living weapons buried in an ice planet elsewhere in the system. They didn't even know what the energy field the facility contained was for when they attempted to depower it... so naturally that they'd already built a colony and a shipyard to build ships to protect said colony is not really something that factored the existence of the Protodeviln into consideration. In hindsight, the biggest problem is that the Protoculture didn't leave an intelligent computer behind to warn people away from the Protodeviln's prison the way they did on Lux... you'd think they ought to have left a "here be monsters" sign or something. Like I've indicated previously, we don't know what percentage of those ships already existed before the Protodeviln were accidentally released... but we're talking about a colony that had an impressive military manufacturing infrastructure (and the Megaroad-class ships did have internal factories) and a populace that could be put to work with no argument, debate, or pay.
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Now that I know the censorship is gone, I'm doubly stoked to pick mine up later today.
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What I mean, and what most of the other contributors in this thread have also told you, is that there is no practical advantage to a transformable ground mecha in Macross. You keep banging on with examples that actually disprove your point and acting as though they support it... The Octos is only effective in coastal warfare... and while Earth does have a lot of coastline, we also have a LOT more inland area where the Octos would be pretty much useless. There isn't any coastline in space either, and the Octos is not spaceworthy. (Never mind that it's also slower, and not nearly as well armed or armored, compared to the other Destroids.) Being able to carry five or six troops who would be completely useless in a fight against the Zentradi or other mecha is not an advantage. Infantry stopped being the default currency of warfare in 2009 in Macross. Both of your premises here are false. The Tomahawk has a definitive advantage in power plant function because it's using a thermonuclear reactor, the Octos had to use two different power systems: a diesel turbine for land warfare and fuel cells for underwater operation. Also, the Octos did not acquire a generator output sufficient to use energy conversion armor until after the UN Wars, when the few units produced after the war were outfitted with thermonuclear reactors. The Tomahawk's officially-listed maximum land speed was 180km/h, making it almost exactly twice as fast as the Octos's rolling speed and four times as fast as the Octos's walking speed. The Octos was massively outgunned by the Tomahawk... and, really, it was outgunned by the Cheyenne as well. Yes, the Octos was a specialized combat vehicle, but its problem was that it was overspecialized. It could do one, and only one thing well. It was really useful in coastal surprise attacks, but other than that it was a resolutely mediocre unit. Being able to transport one fireteam's worth of infantry is no advantage in a giant robot fight, and as I pointed out earlier it didn't have energy conversion armor capability during the UN Wars either. (Plus you're assuming that energy conversion armor is automatically superior to composite armor regardless of the thickness... and that isn't accurate either. Per Macross Chronicle, the heavy composite armor of Destroids surpasses the defensive ability of energy conversion armor used by Valkyries.) That's only half-true. Yes, the UN Forces restarted production of the Octos and built 28 more... but Macross Chronicle's coverage of the Octos explicitly states that its production cost was so high that very few units were built. (That's said right in the first paragraph on the Mechanic Sheet.) There were almost four times as many Tomahawk Mk.VI destroids assigned to the SLV-111 Prometheus as there were Octos units built for the Anti-UN Alliance and UN Forces combined. Talking to yourself, mate? Because it seems I've caught you ignoring official information inconvenient to your point of view an awful lot in this last post. Then, as pointed out previously, this is not the right forum for your topic.
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Really, with a working shipyard capable of building something like the fleet flagship space carrier already in their possession, it doesn't strike me as being all that unreasonable that a shipyard like that could produce the ~500 ships of the Varauta Army fleet in two years. It's highly probable that quite a few of the ships were already built by the colonists in the twenty-odd years they'd had to bolster their forces between the initial settlement and Protodeviln's takeover. An emigrant fleet from that period would've already had a defense force of around 80 warships, and with that huge mothership it seems the Varauta colony was concerned about the prospect of a Zentradi branch fleet showing up uninvited and in the midst of an arms buildup even before they were captured. Still, basically 60% of that fleet was made up of the Vanguard Frigate-type warships that are about 1/2 the size of a Northampton-class stealth frigate probably helped speed the blow, and the other classes were either of comparable size or smaller than comparable UN Forces warships. They did have a brainwashed slave workforce of over half a million to play with too...
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Yes. Many of us own paper copies of the book. Several of us own multiple copies. We know what the book says, and that the things you're referring to here are mostly design studies that never went anywhere. That would be your problem, not his... as you seem determined to plow ahead with a thoroughly discredited premise. Yes, the fact that Macross focuses on the Valkyrie does not mean that over types of variable mecha cannot exist... but it's also a fact that the Macross setting is one in which a transforming ground mecha has no practical advantage. The variable submarine "Octos" was so expensive that only 120 were built, and it really wasn't useful for much besides coastal attacks. It was far slower and less heavily armed than a conventional Destroid. The City-7 patroid... well... it was a bloody joke. It's not prohibited... but it doesn't belong here either. It belongs in the fan-fiction section.
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Well, that's an interesting point... we know that the 4th planet of the system humans know as Varauta was originally an advanced arsenal world when its scientists developed the technical theory behind the Advanced All-Environment Bio-Weapon (Evil series Zentradi) and biological super dimension energy gates which made the accident that bonded extradimensional energy beings to the Evil-series prototypes possible ("creating" the Protodeviln). We don't know that the Protoculture's counterattack against the Supervision Army left much (if anything) standing on the planet's surface when they finally captured the Protodeviln and built a prison to hold them, then turned the planet into a frozen wasteland with an entropy control field. It was still very much a barren, frozen wasteland half a million years in the future, when the Varauta system's survey group accidentally awoke the Protodeviln while examining the archaeotech of their prison. The Varauta Army ships from Macross 7 were produced by the shipyards (and shipwrights) of the captured and brainwashed human colony set up by Megaroad 13 in the Varauta system. Some of the ships, like the fleet flagship, predate the Protodeviln's awakening in 2043.
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Yeah, they aren't really specific about what "upgrades" were made to the base human starship designs, but the Varauta Army's fleet is human warships. I think the only one of the classes that was actually developed completely under the Protodeviln occupation was the "New Gigantic Carrier", which was meant to address their tactical shortcoming of not having a dedicated carrier.
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... what's a puzzle about it? The official chronology tells us point-blank that the Protodeviln raised an army from the spiritia-drained and mind-controlled Protoculture and Zentradi they encountered to fight for them and secure more spiritia to sustain themselves in three-dimensional space. That army was the Supervision Army. The first world to fall under their control was the world where their bio-weapon bodies were built, which was an advanced arsenal world for one side in the Schism War. It had literally everything they would need to produce a war fleet and even soldiers... including an enslavable population of technical experts. The ships in Macross 7 were, yes, vessels built by the Varauta system colony established by Megaroad-13 and improved with some ancient technologies the Protodeviln were able to supply. Geperunicch's flagship was originally constructed by the colony to be the flagship of their planetary defense against large-scale threats like rogue Zentradi fleets. They likely had to build a large number of new vessels to reach their ~500 warship fleet due to the fact that they turned most of the population into brainwashed soldiers, rather than the fraction who would have actually been soldiers in the UN Forces. Emigrant ships are, as a matter of course, equipped with manufacturing facilities... but in this case the Varauta system colony looks to have had a fairly extensive shipbuilding infrastructure already, considering the largest ship on the "Varauta Army" fleet predates the Protodeviln's accidental release from captivity.
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... your conclusion is pretty much the exact opposite of the OVA's presentation though. The Mardook's legend of the Ship of Alus (アルスの舟) basically identifies it solely as a ship from a blue planet that they would one day encounter, which would bring peace to their people and effectively end their crusade across the galaxy. Whether or not there was ever a real, physical Ship of Alus that was the basis for their religion's prophecy about it, but there's no denying the Macross's role in the war essentially fulfilled the criteria of the prophecy. It was a ship from a blue planet (Earth) that brought peace (via the songs of love spread by the emulators) to the Mardook and ended their genocidal crusade across the galaxy. Ingues and Ishtar's conclusions were that the ship was the Ship of Alus, and that seems to have turned it into a self-fulfilling prophecy as Ingues goes above and beyond his usual cruelty to ensure that he isn't overthrown... resulting in pushing his people too far and them deciding they're better off without him. As far as why they leave Earth after signing a peace treaty with the UN Government... that's to go figure out what to do with their lives now that the ancient raison d'être behind their culture and society has gone up in a thermonuclear explosion.
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... the Protodeviln didn't do ships, there were only seven of them and they don't need ships to survive in space or travel by fold. The Supervision Army was the Protodeviln's military force, but their aesthetic doesn't seem to correspond to the Zentradi ships we've seen.
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Yes and no.The only source I know of offhand that treats the difference in the NP-AR-01 forearm pack as an actual in-universe design variation rather than a design being polished by the mechanical designer for the movie version is Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Valkyrie Vol.2. The official stats treat the DYRL version as identical in all respects to the TV version, but Master File has DYRL's version down as being a later variant of the arm pack (NP-AR-01C, to Macross TV's NP-AR-01B). The unhelpful "but..." that you probably saw coming is that the book is not official setting material, and its explanation of the NP-AR-01C's increased size is not an increase in armament. What it attributes the increase in the pack's size to is the pack's internal fuel tanks being expanded to hold 170 more liters of fuel per pack (for a net gain of 340L, or 6.77% of the FAST Pack's total fuel capacity).
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Not to diverge too far from the central topic, but the problem with energy conversion armor and transformation is at least as much a case of the fighter earmarking most of the output of its reactors for the (admittedly inefficient) production of the massive amounts of thrust of which they're capable as it is the energy conversion armor technology's power requirements. What changed in Macross Frontier's (5th Generation?) Valkyries is that Stage II thermonuclear reaction turbine engines seem to have finally reached a point where the increase in reactor energy production is outstripping the increase in system demands on that output. Having four engines (or a fold dimension resonance system) just increases the available surplus to a more usable level. Destroids can get by with relatively low-output (and therefore substantially less expensive) thermonuclear reaction furnaces because not being weight-sensitive means they can use conventional armor instead of energy conversion armor and they don't have to siphon a large percentage of heat energy or plasma off the fusion reaction to heat intake air or provide a plasma stream for thrust production. All of the energy produced in the reaction can be harnessed to meet energy requirements for onboard systems.
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That's a perfect illustration of the point... according to the written spec, the VF-1 Super Valkyrie is only supposed to have 30 micro-missiles of various types (12 in each HMMP-02 missile pod, 3 in each NP-AR-01 pack)1. 1. Or, in a few model kit-connected cases, 46... with twenty in each HMMP-02 missile pod and three in each NP-AR-01 pack.
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I've examined a few scenes for this kind of thing and I've found they're inaccurate as often as they're accurate when it comes to matching missile counts to what's given in the print stats. They seem to err on the side of what's dramatic rather than what's mercilessly accurate... but then, on a few occasions Kawamori has said things about the shows being dramatizations of the wars rather than strictly literal depictions of them, and we know how much the film industry loves to give guns more ammo than they realistically hold. Rambo wouldn't have been nearly as impressive visually if the protagonist's machinegun had run out of bullets inside of ten seconds. The instances of (apparent) inaccuracy have gone down as time has gone on... I suspect in large part because the Valkyries have gotten larger and are carrying progressively more missiles. A VF-1 Super Valkyrie from the series could fire two-dozen micro-missiles and then it's done... a YF-29 or YF-30 could fire that and still have 3/4 of its capacity left.
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... it isn't, and in fact that it isn't more cost-effective is a big part of my point. Even Macross's creators have hung a lampshade on the fact that a transforming mecha should be nowhere near as cost-effective to build and operate as a normal giant robot. That's why the Valkyrie is said to cost 20 times what a Destroid does, and the UN Forces supplement the necessary Valkyries with unmanned fighters and (occasionally) non-transforming combat aircraft. If someone in-universe built a variable tank with all the same technology as a Valkyrie and managed to keep the cost to only 1/2 of what a Valkyrie costs, you could still field 10 Destroids for what you're spending on the one variable tank. As the Destroid has just about the same armor strength as the Valkyrie, will likely carry more direct-fire weaponry, and can be fielded in larger numbers, it really torpedoes the idea that a variable tank would be a viable platform... and that's not even considering the setting offering zero tactical advantage to the transforming ground mecha. It's not ALL in the armor and reactor, but a lot of it is... energy conversion armor is expensive stuff, and at least at first the Destroids of the First Space War were able to achieve better armor strength than a Valkyrie at a fraction of the cost because they could use a greater thickness of "conventional" (overtechnology materials) armor instead of energy conversion armor. The latest ASWAG ECA was so expensive in 2059 that the VF-25 only used it in one or two places on the entire airframe and the Armored Pack, which uses the stuff extensively, is so costly that only the most experience pilots are allowed to use it. Eh... we do see infantry and armored fighting vehicles, and the EX-Gear special forces, though I wouldn't lump the Maverick in with them as that's not a front-line unit. That was an improvised design for long-range artillery support (a missile-toting miniature partner to the Monster) built for anti-warship operations in space.
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The Protodeviln aren't really a race, technically... the bodies are designer bio-technological weapon prototypes, and the minds are energy beings from another universe. The Vajra and Galactic Whales don't really count because the Vajra decided to go elsewhere and leave humanity to its own devices and the Galactic Whales don't appear to be sentient by any human meaning of the term. (The Dyaus from Macross 30 are probably in this category too.) Well, the government may not be Earth-centric, but its de facto seat of power is still Earth IIRC. Maybe, maybe not... Earth may have taken a beating in the First Space War, but it seems like humanity is the most technologically-advanced sub-Protoculture species in the setting. If the other newly-introduced species in Macross Delta were encountered while still pre-atomic, pre-spaceflight Machine Age cultures like the Zolans, humanity may be the most numerous species by dint of their status as a high-tech interstellar culture. The population of Earth in the height of the Machine Age was around 2 billion... with the average emigrant fleet from 2030 on now having a population of upwards of a million people, and those being launched at a rate of one or two a year, there are likely more humans in the galaxy than any other one Protoculture-created species (except the Zentradi, who have a lock on the top spot with their probable population of several trillion). Cloning is cheating, but it's undeniably effective. Sure. The Zolans haven't shown up in many titles because they were only introduced in Macross Dynamite 7 and there haven't been that many titles set after that thus far... so named Zolan characters are a bit thin on the ground. As far as why Michel and Jessica Blanc didn't exhibit the distinctive differently-colored bangs (or forearm hair in Michel's case), the reason is that they're only part-Zolan. I don't recall if they identify the exact order, but they're either 1/2 or 1/4 Zolan by intermarriage between humans, Zolans, and Zentradi. Macross R's Anri Mahlberg is a more typical Zolan. We don't see art of him without his suitcoat on, so he may or may not have the forearm fur, but he definitely has the different-colored bangs and big pointy ears. His description in the Visual Books notes that he's a former doctor (fully licensed) who quit his job at the university hospital in Frontier to become an investor. He lives in the Island-1 San Francisco area, is a sharp dresser, a bit of a bodybuilder, and earns some extra money on the side by providing off-the-books medical services to people in the entertainment industry or criminal underworld. He's also gay and sees himself as a sort of a "big sister" figure to the story's protagonist, Chelsea Scarlett. (Think Bobby Margot but not playing it for laughs as much.)
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Yes, I know... but those are issues unique to the Eureka Seven setting. Your other examples are all cases where the robot mode's role was nothing more than "a tank that walks", making the transformation pointless and impractical. Your other examples fall into that exact problem... in their own shows, the transformation was pointless and made the mecha less effective, not more. As I pointed out previously, the D-50C Loto's transformation explicitly made it less effective than either a traditional mobile suit or a conventional main battle tank. The tank mode was just plain unnecessary in a setting where almost every warship can transport a number of full-size mobile suits and mobile suits are perfectly capable of walking, jumping, or flying under their own power. That's why SNRI gave up on the design as unfeasible just a few years after Unicorn... so please stop pretending it's an example of the idea's practicality. ... they didn't. What the heck do you think the Cheyenne II and Super Defender destroids are for? (To say nothing of the Beatrice 8x8 armored fighting vehicles and EX-Gear suits...) Of course, if the enemy has already reached the surface of your planet you have already screwed up horribly, so most defense is focused on keeping the enemy away from your planet or fleet in space. That was the point... to economize the ground forces by producing one multi-role Destroid that could perform the interrelated and highly similar functions of three specialist units. There's no practical advantage to that... inside of a ship or in a surface city, something as large as a Destroid is not going to escape notice by anyone. The power of the weapons being used is such that buildings are not going to provide meaningful protection from enemy fire, and Destroids are designed for ranged combat so getting close to the enemy (especially an enemy like the Zentradi) is handing the enemy the advantage on a silver platter... Not to mention the transformation increases the cost of the mecha, which means the defenders would be able to field fewer units to confront the enemy. Just because all he fired was his gun pod doesn't mean that was all he could fire... just that that was all that was advantageous to use when a missile detonation could've brought tons of rock crashing down on him as easily as Roy. That's debatable. The problem with this line of thinking is that a VF's energy conversion armor is very expensive... and so are the high-output reactors necessary to power it. If you build a variable ground mecha with energy conversion armor and reactors fit to match a modern VF's capabilities, you haven't built a transformable destroid... you built a crippled Valkyrie. Once you've gone that far, it's much more practical and cost-effective to just send the Valkyrie (and maybe strap some Armored Packs to it) rather than replace the cost-effective, simple, easy-to-maintain Destroids with expensive, complex, high-maintenance transformable substitutes.
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's kind of my point, really. Mit is pointing to examples of transforming tanks in other mecha anime series as examples of how effective a transforming robot tank could be... apparently in blissful ignorance of the slight problem that, of his examples, only Eureka Seven depicts applying transformation to a ground vehicle as producing a result that isn't somewhere between moderately ineffective and entirely redundant. If you have a tank mode and a robot mode that are both for land warfare, you have a lot of unnecessary complexity in the design. Even in Macross, the idea quickly takes one on the chin from the simple fact that, after the UN Wars end, there was no real benefit to a variable ground mecha... as in Gundam, it's adding unnecessary cost and complexity in an attempt to fix what isn't broken. There's no real advantage to changing the height profile if the enemy is either 10m tall or piloting a 10m+ tall robot, transforming won't improve land speed when a destroid can already run at 180km/h and will only limit what terrain it can cross, it limits, rather than expands, the armaments the unit can carry... etc. Millennia, really... most of the base designs go back to the Schism War or earlier, ~500,000 years before Macross's present day. Though it's worth noting that even the Zentradi mecha drive home the point that a design should only be as complex as it needs to be to get the job done. Writeups for the Regult and many other units emphasize that their excellent maintainability and reliability springs, in part, from the simplicity that makes them easy to produce on a colossal scale.
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Pretty sure it's your fingers doing the talking on this one... because Great Mechanics.DX 9's "Variable Fighter Evolutionary Theory" article has a heading titled "Accidentally Discovered GERWALK" that describes it as a mode resulting from a failure in the fighter's transformation system. ... what about it? The F-50D Guntank in Mobile Suit Gundam F91 was a prototype built for a canceled program... the transforming Mobile Suit-Tank concept's (Formula 50's) last gasp before SNRI and the Federation concluded the idea wasn't workable. The one that appeared in the film was a dismantled prototype that Roy Jung salvaged in UC 0107 and rebuilt for his museum on Frontier IV. Not to mention the Ghosts don't have fleshy meats inside, so if they lose one there's no loss of life (on their side) and they don't have to train a pilot to fly it... which contributes to keeping pre-flight and non-combat operation costs down. (After all, in peacetime you don't have a bunch of pilots cooling their heels at the pub and drawing a salary...)