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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Sadly, no... the only major players identified in the Anti-Unification Alliance were Russia, Germany, and Israel via their contributions to arming the Alliance. It's implied that the UN Wars may have partly been fought along Cold War lines, with the UN Government's member states (led by former NATO members) squaring off against Anti-Unification partisans in the former Warsaw Pact states. (Just because certain countries aided the Anti-Unification Alliance doesn't necessarily mean the entire nation was supporting their opposition to the UN Government. Russia and Germany were founding members of OTEC and UN Gov't member states, so their representation in the Alliance may have been more a case of the national government aligning itself with the UN Government and some of the nation's districts/states choosing to align themselves in opposition to it.) 1. I don't believe an explicit motive has been given for the attack, but my gut feeling is that it was a terrorist-type attack like bombing St. Petersburg with a reaction weapon... just to show that they could strike anywhere. It could also be that they wanted to keep the 3,055 UN Forces personnel in the Mars fleet from becoming reinforcements in the war. 2. If they wanted to destroy the ship they probably would've just used reaction weaponry. Since they were trying to capture South Ataria Island, it can be assumed that their goal was to capture the ship and any war materiel on the island (and possibly take all of the civilians hostage). The 4th Defensive Battle that is depicted in Macross the First seems to have been an attempt to destroy the SDF-1 Macross and/or the entire island, but that was sort of retaliatory final strike for the dissolved Alliance. 3. Officially, it was to demonstrate that the Alliance had the potential for retaliatory strikes with reaction weaponry... but as for their choice of target, I suspect it was because the Russian government was aligned with the UN Government. Not really a "World War III"... it doesn't look like Russia was publicly/openly supporting the Alliance, or even that all of Russia was a supporter of the Alliance. The UN Wars were a series of local/regional conflicts between the UN Government and various regional groups opposed to the UN Government. All told, the Alliance doesn't seem to have had enough power to credibly threaten the UN Government on a worldwide scale, just to harass and annoy its military in various hotspots of separatist sentiment. France wasn't an Anti-Unification Alliance member, and Germany had been reunified a decade or so before the UN Wars started... but it's clear that certain factions and corporations in Germany supported the Alliance (like Dornier Flugzeugwerke). Israel, well, it's an incredibly independent state that is very proud of, and determined to defend, its sovereignty, so it's not altogether surprising that having to give up some of its independence in the name of a one world government (even one led by a staunch ally like the United States) wouldn't go over well. We have no idea what the disposition of China was, but as they're not mentioned as a supporter of the Alliance they were probably UN Government backers. That's not said officially... but it's highly probable that having destroyed their own nation's second city would have prompted Russian soldiers in, and supporters of, the Alliance would cause them to withdraw their support.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Almost none of what you've said there is accurate... not for Southern Cross, and not for the appalling rewrite. (The only correct detail is that the Spartas can use its main gun in Battle Sniper mode... albeit awkwardly.) That's not correct either... the Spartas's role is effectively equivalent to those of the MBR-04-Mk.VI Tomahawk and ADR-04-Mk.X Defender respectively (MBT equivalent and self-propelled gun), and the Logan and Auroran fill essentially the same role that the Valkyrie does in Macross (all-regime aerospace fighter and land warfare robot). The Destroid running speed is right out of the official stats, and consistent with the presentation of the Destroids in the series and various later titles as being surprisingly agile for its build. They also have much more contact with the ground than a Valkyrie, so their drive train would be more stable on land at high speeds. On the battlefield, Destroids were the victims of the ever-increasing multi-purposefulness of Valkyries. For the defense of ships and bases, Destroids fell victim to their own size and price tag. Most UN Forces ships are too small to reasonably support Destroids for air defense, or would have to curtail their primary offensive/defensive capability to make room for them. Thus, most ships make do with the cheaper, less complicated, stationary anti-aircraft guns and missile phalanxes. Even on the SDF-1 Macross, the Destroids were a supplement to the fixed defenses, not a replacement for them. Problem is, that they were retired is official... in fact, the ones in civilian hands in Macross 7 are referred to as units that were sold to civilians as part of the disposal process. Same with the various VF-1's and other Valkyries that've ended up in civilian hands. There is, also, a key difference between the Destroids and Battle Pods. The Destroids were designed for human crew, and far more effective mecha and cheaper alternatives to air defense became available as time went on. Giant Zentradi don't really have as many options as miclones due to their sheer size, and the mecha they do have are extremely low-maintenance and (with a little improvement by human engineers to make them more survivable) still as murderously effective as their 500,000 year service history would indicate, which makes their continued use economical and practical. The "Super Defender" from Macross the Ride was a recent development by the Macross Galaxy fleet in 2058, and the Cheyenne II likewise seems to be a late 2040's or 2050's-era development. Destroids did continue on after the First Space War, but the niche they carved for themselves and still hold with tenacity seems to be that of heavy work machinery. Destroids seem to be the go-to platform for everything from construction equipment to mining to cargo handling.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Not quite, no... the ELINT Seeker was VE-1, it had a mission code that marked it out as a dedicated electronic warfare craft. So far, all VF-31's have been designated as fighters. The VF-31 Siegfried seems to have a bunch of apparently-arbitrary variants to justify them giving each character's fighter a different head. (The VF-31, like the YF-30, wouldn't need a dedicated ELINT or Recon version, since the ordinance container system on any fighter could be fitted with ELINT equipment without requiring any design changes at all.) Platoon, not squadron... but I wouldn't jump to conclusions based on the VF-31A's markings without knowing the context.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    It's possible there's a launcher door to facilitate B and G mode launching like there was on the YF-29.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Well, yes and no... the YF-21/VF-22 (and Q-Rhea) use the Queadluun-Rau's special inertia vector control system, which was the technological basis for the Inertia Store Converter and probably uses fold carbon, but it's not anywhere near as effective as the fold quartz-based Inertia Store Converter on the YF-24 and all craft derived from it. So it's a "yes" because you could technically produce the same general effect using fold carbon, and it's a "no" because its actual performance is so much lower that it wouldn't be adequate protection against the high performance of an ISC-equipped fighter.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Goodness no... the Destroids aboard City-7 were units that had been retired by the military and subsequently sold off to civilians for conversion into heavy construction or mining equipment (or in some cases, given to retiring soldiers as part of their pension). The Monster in City-7 was problematic because it was crewed by elderly retired soldiers and couldn't actually hit the enemy fighters that it was shooting at... so it was destroying buildings in the city instead. The police patroids were not designed for combat against military-grade equipment... they were only built for the preservation of the public order. Once they were forced to fight against military hardware they were wiped out easily by Valkyries. A few things about this... 1. Al Shahal's garrison wasn't particularly large. 2. They were facing a technologically superior enemy in orbit. 3. The Al Shahal garrison's forces were reduced by the outbreak of Var syndrome among their soldiers on the surface and divided because they were also trying to subdue those soldiers who went on a rampage because of Var syndrome. The Octos units were disabled or destroyed just as easily, if not more so... considering Roy is able to blow their limbs off or even destroy them with the VF-0's coaxial lasers, the lightest weapon it has. They weren't really forced to use the VA-3M... it was just the most appropriate unit for the job considering they needed to hunt an enemy submarine from the air and destroy it underwater. While we don't often see VF's operate underwater, all of them are capable of it down to a certain depth... (~100m for the VF-1). No, it just prevented the Loto from being able to fight against modern mobile suits on an even footing. The last thing an infiltration unit wants is to be completely screwed if they don't kill the enemy with their first shot. As far as replacing the Loto's reactor and giving it energy conversion armor... you'd just be creating something inferior to, and more expensive than, a Cheyenne II or Super Defender destroid. MAHQ's stats are often inaccurate... in some cases extremely so. (I've found one entire section on their site where it's actually not even information from the right series.) Still, even if we were to assume the numbers provided indicate that some of these LFOs/KLFs are capable of 200-300km/h in vehicle mode, they're cars... which means those speeds will be unattainable over rough terrain. Also they're not capable of fighting in their vehicle mode... which makes those numbers effectively meaningless. I'm very familiar with it... and with the way that many mecha are shown to be able to defeat an Itano Circus by shooting down a few missiles and letting the explosions set the other missiles off. It's as much a trademark of Macross as the Itano Circus itself.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Well... a significant portion of this site's membership is from the United States, which is one of three countries in the world that don't use the metric/SI system as their standard. (The other two are Liberia and Myanmar.) Mr March and I are perfectly happy to use metric, as he's from a metric country and I'm an engineer, but many members are used to thinking in terms of Imperial units of measure. Y'know... I don't think I have ever seen an explanation for the unprotected pilot position on the ATAC・01-SCA Spartas hover tank in the few available publications for Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross or the American R****** adaptation. Seems like kind of a huge oversight for an armored fighting vehicle, but I guess the Southern Cross Army wasn't expecting to ever have to actually fight a war since humanity hadn't encountered any aliens and probably wasn't up for a civil war after having only narrowly escaped extinction in a nuclear holocaust by fleeing Earth.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Actually, the VF-27 has both the NUNS kite and the Galaxy fleet insignia on it... it's kind of hard to see on Brera's VF-27γ because the NUNS kite is red and Brera's fighter is painted pinkish-purple. It's much more visible on the VF-27β, which are painted that kind of olive green. The NUNS kite is on the starboard wingtip, while the Galaxy fleet emblem is on the port wingtip and side of the nose. Presumably SMS's VF-25's lack the spiral insignia of the Frontier fleet because they were trial production units not officially attached to fleet NUNS forces. (Though one has to wonder why the VF-171's only bear the NUNS kite and not the fleet insignia...) EDIT: Battle Galaxy also has the Galaxy fleet logo on it, it's on the starboard side of the flight deck near the bridge.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Sure looks like it. Not that I'm aware of, no... the TW1 Tornado Pack does have a dedicated power supply of its own (a reaction engine, power condenser, and capacitor) to feed the heavy quantum beam gun turret, but with its operating time at full power being a matter of a few seconds I doubt it could be used to bolster the barrier. We know that the VF-25's FF-3001A Stage II thermonuclear reaction turbines have a lot more excess output than previous-generation engines... enough that a light form of energy conversion armor can be run in critical areas of the airframe during fighter mode. I would assume that that same excess could be used for operating the pin-point barrier in GERWALK mode, since the thrust requirements in GERWALK are much lower.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    azrael was talking about the Tomahawk's land speed, which he converted from the metric 180 kilometers per hour to the Imperial 112 miles per hour. (He rounded up slightly, it's really 111.8mph.) Aye, Southern Cross in general was a substantial series of bad decisions... and the horrible adaptation did nothing to deny that the mecha were poorly designed. Nothing I can find in official material on the City-7 Patroids suggest that they were inexpensive... and we never see them in any large numbers, which suggest they may actually be quite pricey despite their extremely limited capabilities and poor combat performance. The UN Forces didn't need or want a rather poorly-designed transformable armored car though. They already had Valkyries and Destroids and armored fighting vehicles and so on that did the exact same job in significant numbers. The only Destroids seen aboard City-7 were retired models from the First Space War that had been converted into various kinds of heavy equipment for task like mining and construction. (With the sole exception of a single Mk.II Monster destroid that caused very significant collateral damage attempting to fire on enemy Valkyries.) Because it was a habitat ship, City-7 didn't have a dedicated defense force permanently stationed aboard... it was dependent upon the Valkyries carried by the Battle-7 and other ships of the fleet for protection. Mayor Milia addressed this during the war by having Gamlin Kizaki's Diamond Force placed under her command. True, but few and far between are the foes who hide in the water... the defenses of emigrant planets and Earth are focused around protecting against attacks from space and preventing enemies from reaching the surface. Yes, and the D-50C Loto paid for that carrying capacity, transformation, and small size by using a much less powerful reactor, being able to carry far less fuel, having a much less sophisticated AMBAC system, and reducing overall performance. It was not as heavily armed, as heavily armored, as fast, or as agile as a conventional mobile suit. The Terminus series LFOs from Eureka Seven are not an example of typical LFO performance... they were a series of unstable and unnecessarily finicky super-prototypes that were beyond the abilities of all but the best pilots. That's why the Monsoono series was adopted by the military instead. Also, the data I can find gives that 300km/h speed as its maximum speed in flight. The Octos was nowhere near as fast or capable as a Destroid or Valkyrie on uneven terrain and would be much more prone to sinking into the ground and getting stuck because its incredibly small footprint and heavy weight give it a far greater ground pressure than any of its potential foes. Also, leakage? The reason explicitly given in Macross Zero for the VF-0 not being able to operate underwater was that the fighter's main power system was its conventional jet turbine engines... engines which don't work underwater. They had to use battery power to operate underwater, and that limited their operating time. VF's with thermonuclear reaction turbine engines don't have that issue since oxygen isn't required for them to run. The Octos in Macross Zero only had armor comparable to a modern armored fighting vehicle because it didn't have an engine that had enough output to support energy conversion armor and the composite armor it had needed to be kept light for transformation. The newer Series 04 Destroids and the VF-1 Valkyrie had much better armor. (About 3x better, all told.) In Macross Frontier, we only see EX-Gear infantry fight the weak, larval form Vajra. As we see at the beginning of the series, their weapons are not effective against the mature Vajra whose armor rivals that of a 5th Generation Valkyrie like the VF-25. The problem with this line of reasoning is that even if they were far enough away that the pressure wouldn't kill them, they'd still be shooting at an extremely high-mobility target perfectly capable of intercepting the missiles... assuming said missiles actually had the stopping power to hurt the mecha.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    There's a modest amount of information available on the Unification Wars (plural). Essentially, the Unification Wars were a series of regional conflicts and organized opposition to the Unification Government that sprang up shortly after the public was first told about the existence of aliens and the rough plan to form a world government. Officially, the Unification Wars started in the Middle East in July 2000 (older sources mention it was in a fictional country called the People's Republic of Garalia), though organized opposition to the proposed new government didn't begin until the various nations and organizations that were opposed to the Unification Government's ideology formed a military and political alliance (apparently blissfully ignorant of the irony inherent in doing so) to oppose the new government in January 2001. Other motivations included concerns over the leadership of the UN Government, the distribution of overtechnology to member states (or, as noted by Nora in Zero, the "forced" sharing of technological advances), and the expected assortment of political, ideological, ethnic, and religious quibbles. Apart from a few major battles, we know very little about the day-to-day details of the conflict. The Anti-Unification Alliance Army made no less than three major attempts to invade and capture South Ataria Island: the first in July 2002, the second in January 2005, and the third in May-November 2006. (A flashback story that appears in the Macross the First manga appears to show a fourth Defensive Battle of South Ataria Island on Christmas Eve/Day 2008.) The other four big military actions of the UN Wars were the hijacking of the Oberth-class destroyer Tsiolkovsky in September 2005 and its subsequent use to destroy the UN fleet returning Mars Base personnel to Earth (and the destruction of the Tsiolkovsky by Bruno J. Global's destroyer Goddard), the November 2005 destruction of the Grand Cannon II construction site by the Anti-UN Alliance Army, the October 2006 destruction of St. Petersburg, Russia, by an Anti-UN Alliance reaction missile attack, and the 2008 Mayan Island incident depicted in Macross Zero. Politically and militarily, the former Eastern Bloc (Warsaw Pact) states had a huge influence on the Anti-Unification Alliance... though the resistance to the idea of the UN Government prompted formerly pro-American nations to also side with the Alliance. The Russian influence was particularly strong in their mecha, with a major Russian contribution to both the Sv-51 and Octos (though the Sv-51 was a joint Russian-German-Israeli effort and the Octos was a joint Russian-German project). Most of their equipment was apparently conventional though, with the MiG-29 serving as the main fighter of their forces, though more advanced fighter aircraft became available in small numbers (like the MiM-31 Karyobin from the original series or the Sv-51 in Macross Zero). The UN Wars officially ended in January 2007 with the Russians backing out of the alliance, but the war actually carried on until December 2008 with the various remaining Alliance forces continuing to fight with their much-diminished backing (as in the Mayan Island incident in Macross Zero). Macross the First's alternate depiction of the chronology includes a last, petulant attack on South Ataria island on Christmas 2008, which looks like it'll be brought to a halt by the first combat deployment of the VF-1 Valkyrie.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    So, I found a new one... From Chapter 110 of Jitsu wa Watshi wa (in English, Actually, I am...), we have a Macross Frontier reference... Aizawa apparently wants to be Ranka Lee after graduation.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    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.).
  14. Seto Kaiba
    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.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    *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.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    "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.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    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.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    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.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    ... 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.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Now that I know the censorship is gone, I'm doubly stoked to pick mine up later today.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    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.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    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...
  23. Seto Kaiba
    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.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    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.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    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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