Seto Kaiba

And you're doin' a damn fine job of it. You'd probably be surprised at the amount of seething discontent over there because Palladium DIDN'T strictly adhere to various "factoids"... they're actually raking Irving Jackson over the coals because of it in one book... THAT'S where we're running into trouble... you're assuming that this aspect of Macross history is some vast, blank canvas. It isn't filled in in as great a level of detail as the periods where the shows or other official stories take place, but we know a fair bit about what caused the fall of the Protoculture, the circumstances behind the emegence of the Protodeviln and Supervision Army, and a lot about the circumstances, organization, and "culture" of the Zentradi's purely military society. Macross 7 and Macross Zero both offer a fair amount of insight into the ancient Protoculture, but the print sources go much deeper. Especially the Macross official chronology materials, which spell out a frank timeline of the Protoculture's internal conflicts and their accidental self-destruction at the hands of their own creations.

He may be recalling the somewhat misleading statement that Macross had contributions from the "nascent" AIC and Gainax. Gainax did technically exist back then, in the form of the university student fan film group Daicon Film... whose members established the studio in '84. Macross was Anno's first real commercial project, IIRC. There was a similar situation with someone from AIC, but I've forgotten the guy's name.

Not a tonne... but with the Macross Mecha Manual's needs driving my acquisitions these days, there's at least enough mass there to make a good-sized human. The weird thing about this objection of yours is that I am actually making a couple solid points about what it actually means... in a lot of the cases where you're throwing speculation around, there are official explanations for how this all fits together. Macross's many talented creative minds are not shy about explaining their personal sci-fi playground in frankly impressive depth. They've given, via the shows and publications, direct answers to many of your musings here... That's where we run into trouble... what you're trying to rationalize is the depiction of the Zentradi in the Macross original series with the depiction in DYRL?, the latter being an in-universe fictionalization intended for propaganda purposes. Especially after the many revelations on Lux in Macross 7, the two different versions of the Zentradi's circumstances are largely incompatible... so trying to fit them together just goes to weird places that aren't really compatible with the setting at all (and fly in the face of the answers to your questions that have already been given in official Macross media). Not just printed facts, I also cheerfully work with what's said in the various Macross series, the novelizations, the manga, and those video games that are accepted as part of the larger Macross narrative. Lotsa good stuff! I cite Macross II because I like Macross II and its setting as much as I do the rest of Macross, and despite being a "parallel world" story it has had a few "nods" to its take on things in later Macross lore... also because, where the ongoing Macross timeline is, for most purposes, building upon the version of events in the original series, Macross II's separate timeline builds upon the version of events in DYRL? instead (and the DYRL? take on the Zentradi and Meltrandi is part of the topic of discussion). The Palladium RPG site isn't exactly welcoming to Macross fan-works either, due to a stringent and strictly enforced policy which prohibits the posting of conversions of copyrighted material to which they don't hold a license...

Nope... Studio Nue was always a design studio only. You may be conflating it with Tatsunoko Production Co. Ltd., who were the ones doing the animation and who outsourced part of the workload to other studios including AnimeFriend, StarPro, and so on.

You opened with a series of demonstrably incorrect assertions that you presented as factual, which anyone who'd actually seen the shows would spot for falsehoods right away... before launching into a downward spiral of gibberish that doesn't actually line up with anything in the official Macross setting or chronology. If it were speculation it'd be one thing, but you presented your... views... as not just fact, but alleged common knowledge. No, it really isn't... Lord is 卿 (Kyou), Supreme Commander is 最高司令官 (Saikou shirei-kan), and the title given for Boddole Zer is 司令長官 (Shirei choukan). No, it's taken directly from the show and official published materials... Exsedol even shows them a chart to indicate what level of the chain of command they can do the most damage at by taking out the various fleet commanders. Yes, a Zentradi main fleet is made up of multiple smaller fleets of varying sizes... the branch fleets, direct defense fleets, and what have you. The smallest unit that is presented is not designated a fleet, however, it's the "division" (specifically Quamzin's 7th Aerial Armored Division from the Boddole Zer main fleet's 109th branch fleet). Officially, the "main fleets" are the collections of smaller fleets attached to a mothership or mobile fortress... thought that is effectively placing them under the command of the main fleet's commander. It's explicitly referenced in dialog multiple times, and the official printed materials as well. Your attempt to dismiss the fact is, however, explicitly not correct based on the official Macross materials. The main fleet is not said to have taken its number from anything except the number of main fleets in existence and/or order of commissioning. Like a field army, their numerical assignment is simply sequential. It's explicitly stated in both the original Macross series and Macross: Do You Remember Love?, as well as many official Macross publications like the official encyclopedia Macross Chronicle, Variable Fighter Master File, and numerous others. There are several thousand remaining Zentradi Army main fleets varying in size from hundreds of thousands to a couple million ships... at the Zentradi Army's peak, there were five thousand Fulbtzs Berrentzs-class motherships in operation. In the modern day, there are 2-3,000 of them still kicking around. Macross Chronicle has a fair bit to say about it, Variable Fighter Master File has a brief bit that talks about an emigrant world that was settled by one of the smaller emigrant fleets being attacked and obliterated by one of the smaller Zentradi main fleets, and so on... (In the Macross II timeline, the UN Spacy encounters four more Zentradi Army main fleets and another Meltrandi Army main fleet between the end of the First Space War and the Mardook invasion in 2091. Two of those invasions are featured in the prequels produced for the OVA... Macross 2036 and Macross: Eternal Love Song. Admittedly, not all of those fleets found Earth entirely by accident either...) With the loss of the Protoculture's orchestrating hand, the Zentradi Army's main fleets are basically independent organizations... no evidence is given for any kind of higher authority above that of the commanders of the main fleets. There were plenty of repercussions... just not for Boddole Zer, as he was too busy being dead. The official Macross chronology mentions that the surviving elements of the defeated 118th Main Fleet is dispersed across a vast area of space thanks to the haphazard nature of their retreat. It's likely that the reason many of them didn't return to attack Earth later on is that they either concluded humans might just be the Protoculture after seeing an entire main fleet laid low like that, and equally likely is that some or all of their forces were "contaminated" by the Minmay attack and didn't want to risk being put on the chopping block by their fellows the way Boddole Zer did to Vrlitwhai, Laplamiz, and Quamzin. (We do know that the UN Spacy has standing orders to either subdue those rogue remaining elements of the fleet via Minmay Attacks or obliterate them outright... attempts to make the Minmay Attack a more precise weapon culminated in Project M and evaluation of the VF-19 Custom by Basara in Macross 7. The Macross II official publications, OVA, and prequels also talk a bit about Earth having to periodically fight returning rogue forces left over from previous main fleets, which became such a regular event in life that it effectively was reduced to the level of spectacle by 2091... the invasion from 10 years previous that inspired Hibiki to become a journalist was one such event, and the UN Spacy clearly thought the Mardook were another rogue Zentradi group up to the point the Minmay Attack didn't work.)

So does the series... and Macross Chronicle... and pretty much every other Macross work to talk about the Zentradi as a whole. The exact number varies a bit, but it's between 1 and 3 thousand fleets, of which Boddole Zer's was just one. (Which one also varies... his was the 118th in the series, and the 425th in the movie.) The attempted character assassination is cute, but inaccurate... the general problem with your posts is a tragic near-total absence of accuracy, to the extent that I have a difficult time believing you've ever actually seen some of these shows. Boddole Zer is never described as the "supreme commander" of the Zentradi Army as a whole... only as the commander of the 118th Main Fleet, or as the mobile fortress/commander of the 425th in DYRL?. (We've seen several other characters of comparable rank and responsibility in Macross.) The Zentradi Army is a military, not a culture... and the women are presented, officially, as being just another form of clone soldier in all official sources. Elite forces, in point of fact, as they were developed near the end of the schism war specifically to operate a new high-performance battle suit called the Queadluun-Rau. It's not so much implied as directly stated, but yeah... there are several thousand more main fleets out and about in the galaxy. The mechanic sheet for the Fulbtzs Berrentzs-class mothership indicates there are between 2 and 3 thousand fleets of several hundred thousand to several million ships still operating. If there was one mothership per fleet, there may have once been as many as 5,000 main fleets at the Zentradi Army's peak. He's not actually referred to as a "Supreme Commander", except in Robotech... That's also not accurate. Refer to Macross Ep.26, in which Exsedol briefs the UN Spacy on the 118th Main Fleet's organization and tactics. One of the things he tells them is to focus on the command ships of each group, because SOP is for a branch fleet to retreat if they've lost their command ship. The ~3 million surviving ships of the 118th Main Fleet didn't flee because they were afraid of anything, they withdrew from the battle zone because the subordinate commanders followed standard Zentradi tactical doctrine and withdrew after the command ships for each unit were sunk, a withdraw that became a rout after their chain of command was decapitated in a spectacular fashion by the destruction of the fleet's mothership.

More like "constantly"... even frigging Wikipedia correctly lists Studio Nue as a design studio.

No... Haruhiko Mikimoto wasn't working for Studio Nue, he worked for Artland. Why would his work on the development of Macross II imply the involvement of a studio he didn't work for...?

You specifically cited Mikimoto's involvement as proof of Studio Nue supporting the production of Macross II in your previous post. He's not a Studio Nue staffer. There WERE returning staffers from other Macross projects working on II, but not from Studio Nue. You might want to consult a dictionary, because "metaphorically" is the correct word to use there. Lad, you've been caught BSing... don't make it worse on yourself. This, right here, revealed you don't know what you're talking about. The IP is not "split up six ways from Sunday". Big West owns the Macross franchise and IP (technically jointly with Studio Nue, but they barely exist at this point), and Tatsunoko has some limited rights to the footage (but not content) of the original series. That's pretty straightforward stuff, really. Macross II is the result of Big West producing a 10th Anniversary OVA on its own, nothing more or less. No, he's said the story of the main cast of the original series is over and done with... Hikaru, Misa, and Minmay. Max is a supporting character.

But do you know why kids love Cinnamon Toast Crunch? Or how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie-roll pop? Dammit man, I need answers! You do know that there are official romanizations for a lot of the names published in Japanese sources, right? As far as "Fleet of the Strongest Women" goes, that's the most literal translation of the episode title: 最強女の艦隊. And, for the record, that the truth is somewhere between DYRL? and the original series has been Kawamori's boilerplate response to continuity questions about them for ages... From the story cues in the three unaired episodes, they take place around episode 40 in the series... not after the end. The most obvious piece of evidence that disproves your position is that the Battle 7 is still in one piece in "Fleet of the Strongest Women"... it was destroyed in the series finale of Macross 7 and was still under construction more than a year later in Dynamite 7. Additionally, that's not the definition of anima spiritia. Its official definition is spiritia with a "bipolar nature" that its generator controls the polarity of, which is damaging to the Protodeviln. (Also used to refer to people who can produce this bipolar spiritia.) No, that just means the unaired episode has something different at the end... see the above for why your position is impossible WRT the series narrative. *sigh* That's demonstrably not true... there are just as many aesthetics retained from the original series as there are from DYRL? in Macross's sequels. Take, for instance, the filming of "Lynn Minmay Story" in-universe in Macross 7... the Zentradi actors are in costume for a TV series Quamzin and a DYRL? Vrlitwhai. Or the action on Galia 4 in Macross Frontier, where we see Zentradi in armor from DYRL? and the TV series side by side. Or, heck, Milia's TV series VF-1 showing up in Macross 7 repeatedly. In other cases, there are official explanations for the changes in aesthetic between the TV series and DYRL?... such as the VF-1's appearance being two different production blocks (the DYRL? version being a postwar block), or Exsedol's DYRL? appearance in Macross 7 being the result of him abandoning life as a miclone for fear of losing his memories and cerebral capacity. It is not, and never has been, a simple case of DYRL? aesthetics replacing everything from the series. No, it is not. They lost control of the Zentradi as their civilization dwindled in the aftermath of the war with the Supervision Army, but that's different. It's specifically noted in the chronology materials that the Zentradi had trouble engaging the Supervision Army specifically because they'd been indoctrinated to "not interfere with the Protoculture", and the Supervision Army was made up in part of brainwashed Protoculture under the control of the Protodeviln. The Zentradi did fight in the schism war, yes... but it's a key plot point in Macross 7 and thoroughly explained in Macross's official publications that the Supervision Army was formed by the Protodeviln using spiritia-drained and brainwashed Protoculture and the local Zentradi forces of the advanced planet where the Evil-series weapons were developed (the ice planet in the Varauta system). This is explicitly not the case... the Evil-series bio-weapon bodies that drew the Protodeviln into the material universe were made as weapons to fight the schism war, and they were not drawn into our universe and those bodies by the testing accident until PC 2871, at which point the schism war had been going on for at least 11 years. The cause of the schism conflict is given in official chronology as over-expansion in the Stellar Republic leading to internal conflicts. You're arguing against a point nobody made... I said the Zentradi were not averse to coexisting with their opposite genders in the course of duty. There is professional rivalry, jockeying for power, and a fair amount of richly-deserved contempt for Quamzin on both sides due to his belief that orders and rules are something that happen to other soldiers, but the males don't hate the females or vice versa. They absolutely were uneasy about the idea of encountering the Protoculture again because, as Exsedol reminds Vrlitwhai when they discover that Earth's population are miclones, they had ancient orders warning them that nothing good will come from them mixing with miclones or interfering with the Protoculture... which was, itself, Protoculture conditioning to prevent them from trying to focus on non-military pursuits. That has no basis in anything in Macross... There's a LOT more done with Macross's setting than just what's in the anime... both narratively and in terms of setting explanation in official publications. Just because you aren't aware of it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Just as a piece of friendly advice... if you don't know what you're talking about, don't try to bluff your way through. Big West owns the Macross franchise, they didn't need to circumvent ANYTHING when they worked with AIC to make Macross II. You believe incorrectly... and, also, Haruhiko Mikimoto was an Artland staffer, not a Studio Nue one. Two things... First, the Macross II OVA was made after Kawamori took his leave of the franchise and before they started trying to rationalize the differences between DYRL? and the original series in any serious way. Second, the actual events and setting of both versions of the First Space War are rather different. It's not an identical story at two different run times. The bare basics are (partially) the same, but they're very much two different stories and settings. Please don't confuse what you personally wanted with what the fandom as a whole wanted. Seriously... you're trying to blast Macross II for not being a direct sequel to the original series and having minimal connection to it. Then , in the same breath, you try to praising the other 90's Macross shows for... not being direct sequels to the original series and having minimal connection to it. (I suppose part of your discontent may be in that the Macross II prequels never made it to the states, so you never got to see the return of Britai, and Komilia's 15 minutes of fame as a Valkyrie ace.) We won't... Kawamori has always maintained that their story is done. They have their closure, and have sailed off into the sunset (metaphorically). We saw Max and Milia's kids, yeah... but we see one of 'em take center stage in the Macross II prequels as well. That's not unique.

There is. It's called Macross Chronicle... and it's about 2,560 pages long.

IIRC, "Fleet of the Strongest Women" wasn't actually part of Macross 7 Encore. Putting aside it being an unaired episode, its events are believed to take place around 10 episodes before the end of the series proper. That's actually not true... Kawamori has historically maintained that neither the original Macross series nor DYRL? is the "true" story of the First Space War, but that the truth is somewhere in the middle. In recent years, he's expanded that view to the rest of Macross as well... (The timeline in the official Macross encyclopedia Macross Chronicle is based on the TV series' events, and there are explanations behind the various uses of DYRL? designs in later Macross shows.) Actually, it's pretty straightforward... within the Macross universe, Do You Remember Love? is actually a propaganda movie which dramatized the First Space War that was released in February 2031. The goal there was, in part, to drive home the ongoing and severe nature of the Zentradi threat. Essentially, there is no "Meltrandi Army" in Macross... and the Zentradi females themselves were/are basically just elite troops in the Zentradi forces. Their enemy is the Supervision Army. Only in the "parallel world" of Macross II, which treats DYRL? as being (mostly) the true and authentic First Space War story, does the Meltrandi Army exist at all. (The Supervision Army does not exist in Macross II.) The Zentradi aren't hell-bent on eliminating the Protoculture... they have standing orders to leave the Protoculture alone. The Supervision Army is, yes, a force made up of the spiritia-drained and brainwashed Protoculture and Zentradi who were taken prisoner by the Protodeviln. The Protodeviln themselves were stopped by the anima spiritia (people who had the ability to produce spiritia that negatively affected the Protodeviln) and sealed away, but the Supervision Army is still supposedly at large. Not sure where you're getting the existentialist fundamentalist thing tho... That's not accurate at all, I'm afraid... The Protoculture did, in fact, create the Zentradi to do their fighting for them. The Zentradi were well aware of this fact, and had no problem with it, being that they were indoctrinated and brainwashed to concern themselves only with military matters and to avoid interfering with the Protoculture. The schism was between two different factions of the Protoculture (the reason for the schism is not given), but it's mentioned in the ruins on Lux that the Protoculture were a divided people for much of their history. There was warfare between the factions, and the "Evil-series bio-weapon" bodies that became the Protodeviln were a weapon one side created for that conflict. The Protodeviln are energy beings from higher dimension space who were accidentally trapped in those bodies when the experimental power source developed to power the amazing combat abilities of the bio-weapons malfunctioned during testing. They never "assumed control" over anyone in government, the Protodeviln spiritia-drained and brainwashed the Protoculture and Zentradi on the world that the bio-weapons had been developed on, and turned them into the start of a conquering army (the Supervision Army) to supply them with spiritia so they could continue to exist on this plane of reality. Their emergence actually ended the schism by presenting both sides with a common enemy, though most of the Protoculture were wiped out in the fighting. Boddole Zer wasn't even alive when the Protoculture were fighting their schism war, or their subsequent war with the Supervision Army. That was half a million years before the "present day" in 2009, and Zentradi lifespans aren't much different from a human's. (DYRL?'s Golg Boddole Zer is an organic computer rather than an actual Zentradi soldier, but even he's only 120,000.) There was no animosity between male and female Zentradi in the series... the rival "Meltrandi Army" was an in-universe invention made for the 2031 propaganda movie Do You Remember Love?. Operational practices passed down from before the ages when the Protoculture civilization still stood are what keep the males and females segregated in the Zentradi Army, and that's done as a way of keeping them from deviating from their purely military mindset. The Zentradi in the Macross series have a pretty decent handle on professional relationships and body language... they just don't have the appropriate cultural context for any interaction beyond platonic, purely military operations. Also, Milia was not viewed with animosity, but with respect and more than a little awe for her status as their fleet's top ace. (The spy trio in particular were mightily pleased that they were being deployed for their mission by Milia herself...) Actually, the Meltrans are all about top piloting skill... in the Macross universe, the female Zentradi were basically the result of the Protoculture engineers on one side of the schism war building a battle suit with uncontrollably high specs, and then resolving that they'd rather build a better pilot than try to make the Queadluun-Rau less high-spec. Laplamiz's direct defense fleet in the series was part of the fleet group which was responsible for protecting the fleet's mothership. The DYRL? Meltrandi Army warships are not said or shown to be more technologically advanced than their Zentradi counterparts, merely built around a different technological school of thought. The DYRL? Zentradi use a lot of organic design aesthetics and a portion of their technology actually has organic components, while the Meltrandi use purely inorganic technology. On most levels their technology is functionally identical. (If one looks to the Macross II timeline, for which DYRL? is canon, Zentran and Meltran overtechnology is actually compatible to the extent that most human ships in that "parallel world" combine them freely.)

Unfortunately, there's not really a direct correlation between the VF-0's deliverable thrust and its generator output thanks to the use of over-tuned conventional turbofan engines. Going balls-out at altitude, a VF-0A/S is pumping out 30,367.15 kilograms-force (297.8kN) of thrust to keep the airframe moving at 808.848 meters per second. So the P in the equation is equal to F (297.8kN) * d (808.848m) / t (1sec), which means the power of the engines under those conditions is 240,874,934N·m/s (or J/s). That's equivalent to 240.9MW, rounded up, but that's the motive power of the airframe at peak output. The generator power is going to be considerably less than that, because it's probably in the high-pressure compressor stage, and gas turbine generators tend to be less than 50% efficient. Assuming the VF-0's EGF-127 turbofans are on a roughly equal footing to the modern Pratt & Whitney F119 turbofan used on the F-22A, that'd give us an approximate efficiency of 40% and therefore a peak output of about 48.175MW per engine. That's a heck of an assumption though, since the efficiency could be as low as 35% (42.153MW/engine) if the engine is not particularly well cooled... or it could even exceed the near-perfect-world 60% efficiency (72.262MW/engine) if there's OTM at play in the generator itself or its thermal system via room temperature superconductors and other supermaterials. That's an awful lot of variance in the range... a delta of 41% means that any guess I made in that range would be little better than throwing darts at the wall while blindfolded, and three sheets to the wind on cheap tequila. Still, ~48MW/engine at peak output isn't that much to play with, and that means ECA alone could potentially be consuming anywhere from 76MW to 130MW to beef up that inch or so of composite armor into something equivalent to a meter-plus thickness of RHA.

There'll be more where that came from, I found a few more fun tidbits while I was looking up the citations for you. I really do need to sit down and spend a weekend itemizing everything in all these books... seems like I spend more time looking for the right book than finding what I need in said book. I wanna know how much power the VF-0 was getting out of those conventional turbines... that'd be the real measure of how energy-intensive some of the basic OTM used in VFs really is.

It's not on M3 yet, I don't have much time to edit the Compendium, and IIRC Macross II isn't really within what sketchley normally covers... in Yoshino's absence, I'm pretty much the only one digging deep into the old Macross II publications. That's not exactly true, man... I know we've discussed this before. They don't cite an exact figure for the VF-2SS, but they do say it has three times the generator output of a VF-1 Valkyrie. It's even one of the few technical tidbits from the OVA that reached the west in English courtesy of Mikimoto's Macross II promo interview in Animerica. (That's 3,900MW if you take the base VF-1 spec from the 90's on, or 10,200MW if you take the Sky Angels view that the 650MW of output on the VF-1 was nominal output and peak output was 1,700MW per engine1. The number should theoretically apply to the VF-XX, and possibly the Metal Siren as well, but not the VF-2JA due to the circumstances of its production.) Considering how the engines function in space, there is actually some logical basis for assuming something like a linear trajectory in power-vs-performance... but as nothing is said about MHD efficiency on later craft, it's impossible to work backwards to a minimum-necessary generator output without assumptions2. (This is one area where Chiba really shines... the VF-1's generator outputs actually are in the right range to produce the amount of thrust necessary to meet the design spec for engine output in space via the MHD. Instead of pulling a random number out of their butts, someone actually sat down and did the math to figure out what the generator requirements would be to plausibly create the amount of thrust in the stats. The efficiency is higher than the real world equivalent, but not unreasonably so, and the math still works.) 1. Macross Journal Extra: VF-1 Valkyrie Special Edition pg.41, FF-2001 engine diagram on lower half. 2. Just ballparking it, you'd need about 4,300MW per engine to produce the thrust the FF-3001 puts out in a "best case" condition... less if the efficiency has improved from the VF-1. The worst case is more like 32,400MW, so you see why we need to know the efficiency to get anywhere near a valid output.

It sounds impressive up to the point where you realize that 86% is 440KW, which is peanuts by Macross's standards. That's 0.067% the output of a first-generation thermonuclear reaction turbine engine. Yes, but we can say with reasonable confidence that they're at least as good as the VF-1's engines. How much better they are depends on if generator output scales linearly with engine thrust the way it does in the Macross II mecha stats. To be frank, there's not really a lot of tactical advantage to destroids after the First Space War. They're cheaper than a VF, sure, but they don't really have any practical offensive application in space combat because they're not flight-capable... and, for most ships, what they offer in terms of defensive ability can be achieved a lot cheaper via beam CIWS and AA missile launcher systems. They've got a bit of a potential niche in supplementing the air defenses of the largest emigrant ships, but otherwise they don't really have much to offer. Now that one is easier to guess at... presumably, the EW ordinance container would contain incorporate a fold-wave radar and the other sensors common to most AEW, ELINT, and reconnaissance VFs of the period (UHF and VHF antennae, LIDAR and various other sensors). Some of the older VF's have been known to carry FOTD systems for missile evasion... but other than that, nothing is really coming to mind. The scarcity of fold quartz is a matter that's going to affect all 5th Generation VF's (YF-24 and all derivatives thereof) because they use fold quartz in the ISC and other systems... but then again, humanity has at least one or two planets in its possession which are relatively rich in the stuff, and it's only a problem until humanity figures out how to artificially recreate the process the Vajra queens use to refine fold quartz.

That'd be an opinion unsupported by fact, but in the absence of any further explanation from Macross's creators it's as valid as any other unsubstantiated theory. All thermonuclear reaction turbine engines use intake air as a coolant and propellant while operating in atmosphere... that's literally how they produce thrust. Instead of burning hydrocarbons to heat intake air, they dissipate heat from the reaction into intake air in the space behind the high-pressure compressor stage. The VF-19 engine designations are somewhat messy and convoluted at present due to a typographical error in Macross Chronicle that was copied by Master File. When they started messing around with engine model numbers, they accidentally messed up their engine thrust numbers for the VF-19F/S type and produced a logical impossibility (as noted on M3). As a result, there's a fair bit of confusion and contradiction as to which models of VF-19 use which engine, in which I generally recommend citing the more recent set of model numbers but retaining the original thrust values for the F and S variants, which neatly solves the problem. Once the more egregious conflicts are tidied away, it appears that the FF-2500 series engines were only used on the prototype... with the 1st mass-production type going back to the less overkill FF-2200 and the 2nd mass-production type going to more stable FF-2550 series engines. The overheating problem may simply have been resolved by material improvements or design changes in later models of engine, and/or changes to the airframe itself. About a 25% improvement in output, which is pretty small compared to some of the jumps the VFs have seen in output. They're not exactly staging a comeback... I apologize in advance for the problems caused by clumsy phraseology over there on the Compendium. In practice, the destroids might not be completely extinct... but they're clinging to existence by the fingertips most of them don't have. You'll have no doubt noted these are not "new" destroid models, but rather refurbished versions of decades-old models used locally by one fleet or other... and that they're the only (sarcastic fingerquotes "new") models to appear after the First Space War. They're not all that common either, if Macross Chronicle is any indication. The Mechanic Sheet discussing the Vanquish-related vehicles of 2058 doesn't mention any other users for the Super Defender besides its developer, Macross Galaxy. The Cheyenne II's mechanic sheet seems to be leaning the same way, discussing only that the Macross Frontier fleet has them principally because they wanted something that could operate inside the domes easily (without messing up the pavement), and that they often aren't even manned. Very likely, yes... there is precedent for civilian-level destroid-type vehicles being able to operate military-grade weaponry, such as the City-7 police mecha in Macross 7 being equipped with spare VF-11 gun pods, and the ground-based counterparts using heavy bazookas that look oddly like the RX-78-2's. They don't explain what "auxiliary propulsion units" means. I'd guess that it means a booster rocket or possibly fuel tank. They have fold boosters for fold travel, and the models available in the 2050's are already reusable.

Man, there's no pleasing some people... I guess the Konig Monster with the gatling cannons is more like a Guntank run amok.

Debatable... it was relevant, and served to clear up various misconceptions some folks had about the (over)technology under discussion. More or less, yeah... the YF-19's trial gun pack from early in Macross Plus had some shades of that too, with the big honking beam gun on its forearm. You could argue the Konig Monster variant that showed up in the teaser for Macross Frontier's second movie is the final realization of the idea, what with it having a pair of massive rotary cannons for arms in addition to everything else it already had.

The energy sustaining the fusion reaction inside a thermonuclear reaction turbine isn't the heat and pressure of the reaction itself... it's the gravitational pressure of the heavy quantum manipulated by the engine's gravity inertia control (GIC) system. In space, the VFs are using the plasma stream from the reaction as propellant, supported by a MHD plasma ion thruster in the rear of the turbine body. (In principle, it's not dissimilar from a Star Trek impulse engine.)

Aaaaaaactually... there's an explanation for that in the Macross 30 novelization. You see, one of the ways the New UN Government regulates the development of military potential among its member "states" is that the various local governments are required to disclose the specifications of new mobile weapons and other military technologies that they develop for production to the "federal" government and military. Some proprietary information can be withheld at times, like the YF-24 spec that was shared with the emigrant fleets, but developing a new fighter or other weapon completely in secret is a violation of interstellar law. Classifying the newly-developed Chronos as a pre-production prototype effectively allowed S.M.S.'s Uroboros branch office to put off having to make full disclosure of the new fighter's specs and technological advances to the government and military for a while. The Macross Galaxy fleet pulled off a more complicated version of the same "cheat" by not only failing to disclose that a completed VF-27 had entered production, but also by trotting out a couple under-strength prototypes like the YF-27-5 for the public to gawp at for the purpose of spreading misinformation about the VF-27's level of capability. (Though it would appear that, after the Galaxy fleet's role in the Vajra conflict became known, General Galaxy may have been forced to cough up the VF-27 spec... since at least one production model VF-27 is known to be operated outside the Macross Galaxy fleet by the Uroboros Hunter's Guild.) Perhaps one day, but not now.

Yep, and I'm one. Thanks to M3's insatiable appetite for art books, I've got three copies of the game... two limited editions, and one regular. Still can't get the bleeping YF-21 FAST packs tho. I suck at the Vanquish races. While I do understand the aversion to "wild mass hypothesizing" (esp. after the whole Shaloom thing), the whole thread is about a "what if" scenario, so a certain amount of conjecture is probably OK, s'long as it fits with the documented facts. ... ... ... Part of me wants to dispute this, but the "padded trash can" is a documented piece of VF equipment from the original series. Max and Milia were such responsible parents... Strictly speaking, it's "with enough heat and pressure" anything will fuse. Mass is not necessarily a part of the equation, though it IS on OTM thermonuclear reaction power systems because the reaction there is catalyzed/moderated by trapped heavy quanta* in the engine's gravity controller. * A form of exotic matter from super dimension space (fold space) which has almost inconceivable mass... so much so that, in sufficient quantities, it will auto-ignite in a fusion reaction when pulled into our universe. Heavy quantum is most commonly used for gravity manipulation, including stand-alone gravity control systems and the GIC systems that moderate and control thermonuclear reaction systems. It's also used as the detonation trigger in thermonuclear reaction warheads, the warhead material itself in dimension eaters, and in dimension energy weapons, which direct beams or bolts of heavy quantum fusion plasma (or possibly heavy quantum itself, in more recent cases). You could make a cogent argument that, even though being a technology demonstrator was not the YF-30's primary purpose, it did serve as one in a secondary capacity for the ordinance container system that Aisha was so proud of. She sure as hell seems to be of the opinion that it's the future of modularized VF weaponry.

There are a lot of... unusual... variants in the VF-19 Master File. The "VIP-calibur" is actually one of the less insane ones. For most purposes, a VF is perfectly adept at doing that... as seen in Macross Frontier, Macross 7, etc.. By the 2040's, the destroids were largely antiques and the only thing similar belonged to the civilian authorities. In their defense, very few of us on this site have a working grasp of Japanese or the patience to wade through something as appallingly unintelligible as the engrish spat out by Babelfish or Google Translate. (It probably doesn't help that Macross Chronicle's YF-30 mechanic sheet doesn't actually talk about the reason for the YF-30 being made... only about its design.)

There are tandem cockpit variants of the VF-19, and Master File also has a transport version of the VF-19 with no battroid mode that seats like six people. It should also be possible to fit a jump seat to the VF-19 1st mass production type. Based on the line art and VF-22 Master File, it doesn't appear that there's enough room to fit a duffel bag behind the pilot's seat... let alone a human. The YF-30's cockpit is pretty much identical to that of the other 5th Generation VFs, so it's a pretty safe bet that it has the same covered jump seat arrangement that the VF-25 had.