Seto Kaiba
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Yep... as far as I'm aware, Macross 7 was the last time the designation "ARMD" was used. Guantanamo-class ships with visible designations (via holographic displays) in Macross Frontier are shown with CV or CVR hull codes instead. Mind you, it wasn't just the ARMD designation that carried over into later titles. The brief view of the Macross-1 fleet we're shown early in Macross 7 contains what is clearly an ARMD II-class carrier, and Macross 7 Trash briefly showed a modified ARMD-class carrier in the Macross-7 fleet.
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Yep. Er... remember, they never got to actually be the ship's arms until a few years later, in a separate Macross title. No, I meant the "ARMD" hull code fell out of use... we know that they made a great many of the ARMD-class (and ARMD II-class) space carriers. The "ARMD" hull code is used on two (three) classes of ship... the TV series ARMD, the movie ARMD (known as the ARMD II-class in VFMF), and one other... The Guantanamo-class (officially AKA the Advanced ARMD-class) still carried the hull code "ARMD" through at least Macross 7's era. Production line art for Macross 7 has the exemplar Guantanamo-class ship (the Maizuru) identified as ARMD-362. Understandable, and the official material does mention that the Megaroad-class ships are less-than-ideal in terms of their overall structural strength (IIRC the exact way they phrase it is something to do with the hull's rigidity), which, in connection with minimal armament, makes them unsuited to combat. Of course, overtechnology materials like hypercarbon/spacemetal and herculite are terrifyingly tough. The old Sky Angels book (which first asserted the SDF-3 to be Britai's ship) tried to put a rough RHA equivalency on it... something to the tune of a 100:1 advantage in durability compared to armor-grade steel. 1.2 inches (30mm) of OTMat armor was equivalent to 9.8 feet (300cm) of the conventional alternative on the VF-1, and even if starship armor isn't sterner stuff than that, the thicknesses involved are definitely going to work to the ship's advantage. Macross Chronicle suggests that the state of human shipbuilding advanced by leaps and bounds in the aftermath of the first space war, and the Megaroad-class benefited from that. Slap a barrier system on it (it almost certainly had one) and what you've got might not be a battleship, but it's probably worthy of being called a fortress. (... and, on consulting a dictionary, "fortress" makes a lot of sense when defined as "a fortified town".)
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Hmm... true, that bit down there near the stern does look a fair bit like an ARMD-class space carrier, but I can't find anything in the printed materials that suggests the Megaroad-class colony ships had docked ARMDs. My guess would be that's probably just part of the hull, either a stylistic coincidence or the result of someone (in-universe) cutting corners on the design by using appropriating parts of the ARMD-class's design (or possibly incomplete ARMDs themselves) to make a quick and dirty hangar. We've only seen that general part of the ship up close once... in Macross M3's opening, but in that animation Max and Milia were shown launching from those two black slits right below the top of the "outrigger", well away from the ARMD-lookin' bit. As hull codes go, "Super Dimension Fortress" is awfully vague... so I don't think it necessarily has to entail the ship having any real combat ability at all. Almost all the other ships with known hull codes are based on real world ones that identify their actual combat role in familiar terms (carriers, frigates, etc.). It kind of implies that the ship is protecting something inside itself... which would make sense when you consider that it ended up containing a city, and the Megaroad-class was little more than a city in a bubble with engines on one end. Possible... but I'm not sure that's the source. Docking to a larger ship isn't really part of the "ARMD" designation though... just that it's one big carrier deck with engines and weapons installed. That's a pretty fair description of almost every carrier out there... though it seems likely that the reason it's qualified that way is that the ARMDs were originally designed to be stationary orbital airstrips for planetary defense. Not sure why they let it fall out of use...
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Well... if it's the Robotech ones, they haven't had any new material to argue about in thirty years, so... 's there actually a source for that? I know Chronicle says the Megaroad-class's armaments were light/negligible, but I don't recall anything that says the Megaroad-class had attached ARMDs. Pretty sure they've standing on an old bit of lore there, about the DYRL version (and, IIRC, possibly the series version) having originally been intended for extrasolar exploration. That's also from the opening bit in Macross Frontier alluded to earlier... and corroborated by Macross Chronicle, same as the Megaroad-class's SDF hull code. Carriers in Macross using the real-world CV ain't new... though presumably they went with NMCV to differentiate them from the (much smaller) carriers using other flavors of CV. The ARMD-class space carriers carried the dual code of ARMD/SCV initially (goes back to at least Sky Angels in '84), and then they dropped the leading S somewhere between then and the Guantanamo-class (which is ARMD/CV). After that, it appears it dropped the ARMD entirely, so all carriers are just using CV and mission specific variations thereof. (The Uraga-class is seen using CV and CVS, the Guantanamo-class uses CV and CVR, the Valhalla III-type uses VCV, etc.) I'd have to double-check, but I'm pretty sure that's the work of just one (well-intentioned) fan... yui. She's not always accurate, but she's a fan of both shows (IIRC she's an army kid?) and tries to add their stuff in separate sections on the Japanese Wiki pages for Macross, Southern Cross, and MOSPEADA. Really, I think that ship sailed a loooooooong time ago... certainly long before Macross Frontier. The creators of Macross had already earmarked the SDF-2 as an emigrant ship before Masahiro Chiba's doujinshi set down the idea that Britai's ship was the SDF-3. True, they didn't decide that it wasn't going to remain a Macross-class ship until later, but since Sky Angels was just a doujinshi I don't think they felt much obligation to follow what was in there. I think the deal was likely sealed by the time Macross 7 went to air, and they established that there had been at least a dozen later Megaroad-class ships, and the Megaroad-class had been thoroughly established as a Macross-class derivative. My guess would be SDFN came about because SDF was already earmarked for the Megaroad-class emigrant ships, and they felt it'd have more resonance than if they went the New Macross-class round and used MCV. That's almost as bad as the actual meaning of ARMD... Armaments Rigged-up Moving Deck.
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Huh... well, that explains that then. I'm sure we all remember the big fuss when we got our first glimpse of what turned out to be the SDFN-04 General Bruno J. Global in Macross Frontier. There was a LOT of confusion over what that ship represented, due in no small measure to the then-common belief that the SDF-1 Macross and the partially-complete SDF-2 were the sole existing examples of the Macross-class. (Mass-produced Macross-class ships having previously been something unique to the Macross II-verse.) I don't remember, did they actually use the designation SDFN in the dialog? I'll have to review it later. It certainly explains that guy's confusion... especially since hull codes are prone to occasional changes in real life. IIRC, the last USS Enterprise (a one-off Enterprise-class carrier) had its hull code changed twice during its service life... from CVA-65 to CVAN-65, and then to CVN-65. Did we ever clear up what the N is in SDFN? Oh, it's absolutely true that the fansub people tend to screw up the terminology a lot... though it's easy to forgive them, since the majority of them aren't really what you'd call die-hard Macross fans with access to the kind of information we have. It's a little bit less easy to overlook it when regional distributors/licensees screw up like that. US Renditions screwed up so hard they even got the year the show was set in wrong, and misspelled the name of the antagonists despite being supplied with the correct spelling IN ENGLISH.
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I dunno... if the SDFN-4 Global was his first port of call for objections, my guess would be that the guy in question may have just not been aware of the mass-production Macross-class ships (SDFNs) were part of a separate numbering sequence from the old SDF-1 Macross and the Megaroad-class colony ships. After all, Alto and company don't really get all that specific about what the SDFN-4 was beyond it being the old flagship of the 117th Research Fleet and a "first generation Macross". Since it's relatively common knowledge that the Megaroad-01 was converted from the Macross-class SDF-2, he may have taken the SDFN-4 to be the SDF-4, and therefore assumed that the SDFs after SDF-2 went back to being Macross-class ships. Just a theory...
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Er... my friend, we HAVE seen the SDF-2 on screen on at least three separate occasions. Once, at its debut in Macross Flashback 2012... and then again in setting summations at the start of episodes of Macross 7 and Macross Frontier. There are probably a couple others I'm forgetting from various video games, etc. We've also seen at least a representation of the SDF-3 courtesy of Frontier, which identifies it as a Megaroad-class emigrant ship. As far as the Megaroad-class ships being designated SDF-#, that bit's fairly straightforward... "Megaroad" is the ship's name (as well as the name of their class), but it's not a proper military hull code/pennant number. Codes like that are used to identify both the identity and type/role of ship at a glance... a more information-rich unique identifier than just a name. It's one of those minor bits of military realism that crop up in the otherwise fanciful Macross setting. Hull codes/pennant numbers for most of the known classes of ship have cropped up at one point or another, so it'd be weird if the Megaroad-class ships DIDN'T have them. Since the original Megaroad-class ship had its inauspicious beginnings as a half-built Macross-class ship, they seem to have kept that SDF designation after the SDF-1 Macross was retired... perhaps as a nod to the Macross's role as the first ship with an internal city.
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He's said a lot of different variations on the same basic thing in interviews and so on... the individual Macross series take place in related alternate universes or are differing interpretations/dramatizations of the "true history", and so on. It explains away various examples of zeerust and other minor inconsistencies. There's still an "official setting", which basically amounts to the chronology (shared history) and other aspects of continuity. If there wasn't an official setting, there wouldn't be any point in the disclaimer that the Master File books Kawamori supervised carry, which says they aren't part of the official setting. I'm inclined to lean towards the SDF-3 being Megaroad-02 because the series is, at least, supposed to be part of the "official setting" and it's corroborated by Macross Chronicle. Pretty much, yeah... though they've been favoring the DYRL designs for a long time now... since at least Macross Plus, unless we're counting Macross II, which favored DYRL as the more accurate of the two versions of Space War 1 as the foundation of its own version of Macross history.
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Err... terry, you got a couple false assumptions here. First, that tidbit isn't from Macross's production materials... the SDF-3 allegedly being Britai's old ship is something that comes to us from the "Sky Angels" VF-1 Valkyrie tech manual. That book's a doujinshi, and one that was published the year after Super Dimension Fortress Macross finished its initial broadcast run. It's not, AFAIK, something that shows up in the show's production notes. The Master File series picked it up because it's a spiritual successor to the Sky Angels book, and copies a lot of material out of Chiba's work on the doujinshi... but Master File also self-identifies as not part of the official Macross setting. Second, what you referred to as the gunboat diplomacy theory and trojan horse theory in Macek's "original" work aren't theories... both of those are actually things explicitly mentioned in Macek's (unmentionable) series. The gunboat diplomacy thing comes up as the mission of the SDF-2 in Macek's loose adaptation of Macross, and the trojan horse thing is discussed in what little footage was completed for Sentinels. The WOLFPACK thing is a coincidence... or an unrelated homage to the real-world squadron.
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A fair point... though I thought that was because "Macross 13" was a code name assigned to Macross warships that didn't officially exist or something to that effect? On a side note, it appears Macross Chronicle's revised edition corroborates the SDF-3 = Megaroad-02 stance on Worldguide 12C's (Super Long-Range Emigrant Fleets) back side. (A friend pointed this one out to me, courtesy of sketchley's website.)
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Nah, the UN Forces had a couple manufacturing bases that survived the war intact even before they went out capturing a bunch of factory satellites in Britai's ship. Specifically, they still had the L-5 Manufacturing Station at Earth-Moon L5 (the shipyard which built the ARMD-class space carriers) and the Apollo Base yards on Luna (which were building the SDF-2). According to the series chronology, three months from the war's nominal conclusion in March 2010, shipbuilding activities had resumed at the Apollo Base yards... six months before Britai's old ship was recommissioned as the first new battleship of the post-war UN Forces space fleet. Also, based on the information we have for the Megaroad-class, construction of both SDF-3 Megaroad-02 and SDF-4 Megaroad-03 had begun in September 2010, three months before Britai's ship was recommissioned into the UN Spacy's service... meaning SDF-3 would've already been assigned for three months at the time Britai's ship was to formally enter UN Forces service.
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I know that pain only too well... Er... no, I'm afraid not. Look again at that screen capture I posted. Based on that diagram from Macross Frontier, the designation SDF-003 (SDF-3) was assigned to the colony ship Megaroad-02, second ship of the Megaroad-class. That ship wasn't launched until two years after Megaroad-01, and was the core of a whole separate colony fleet, as corroborated in that in-series graphic. Megaroad-01 has its own separate marker on the chart, as you see, just to the left of Megaroad-02 in that capture. The graphic doesn't show escort ships or anything like that, it only shows all the long-distance emigrant ships progress through the galaxy. All the Megaroad-class ships in the graphic have the offset-by-1 SDF designation (SDF-3 Megaroad-02, SDF-10 Megaroad-09, etc.)
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Gubaba hit the nail on the head there... they show Megaroad-01 as SDF-002 as well, so it seems to be just formatting in their presentation. Also, wasn't Megaroad-01 a military-led expedition anyway? Misa was its captain, anyway... I think I threw up a little in my mouth when I read that... lol, yeah... that's a bad one. Hopefully the mass-produced Macross-class ships were not put into the same fleets with Megaroad ships that shared the same number. IIRC, they made twelve of the mass production Macross-class SDFNs too... though we've only seen two for sure (SDFN-4 and SDFN-8, my pet theory is that in-universe DYRL was filmed with SDFN-1). I dunno... the reason the Megaroad-class apparently inherited the SDF designation was that the original ship of the class was originally laid down as a second Macross-class ship, so the convention theoretically predates the commissioning of Britai's old ship into the UN Forces space fleet.
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Eech... yeah, that's a bloody mess. My gut reaction would be to go with the SDF-3 being a Megaroad-class ship since that comes from a show, as the Master File books self-identify as not part of the "official setting", but I could see a decent argument for going either way. I'm not sure if I'd call the diagram in the show "most reliable" so much as "least suspect".
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Er... so... I may have actually validated the complaint that Britai's ship CANNOT be the SDF-3. This is awkward. This is from 2 minutes, 27 seconds into the "Yak Deculture" edition of Macross Frontier episode 1. Note the circled ship marker... Megaroad 02 and the marking below it, SDF-003. EDIT: Just for shiggles, the other ships visible are Megaroads 1, 4, 6, 9, and 13, and Macross-1, -3, -5, -7, and Frontier. There's also a fun screwup when they get to showing Eden, and two Macross-17's are shown.
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There's a lot of stuff from the Variable Fighter Master File's VF-1 books that came right out of the Sky Angels book, so I figured this tidbit could've as well... and just our luck, it turns out it did. Can't believe I didn't notice it before now. Oy vey... one of those. Had a fun run-in with a bloke like that not too long ago who clearly picked the title of the first Macross publication he could think of when prompted for his source. Unfortunately for him, the first title that popped into his head was that of a Macross 7 h-doujinshi. I wonder what he thought the SDF-3 was? A Megaroad-class ship, most likely... considering the Megaroad ships we see in that little galactic chart in the first few episodes of Frontier ARE all marked "SDF".
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Aaaactually... I think I just re-found where you might've originally seen it, and it IS quite an old mention. Not sure if it's common knowledge, though, since this is probably the first thread I've seen where it was put forward as a fact (though it does make very good sense to me). Like I said earlier, the bit I'd always heard was that Britai's ship was one of the ones that left in the military's escort fleet for the SDF-2 Megaroad-01. Problem is, it's not in the Compendium... but in a really old book. The old Macross Journal Extra: VF-1 Valkyrie Special Edition "Sky Angels" book also makes an offhand mention that Britai's old ship became the SDF-3. I found it in a chart of squadron assignments on page 13 of the book, which lists it as being home to a pair of VF-1 squadrons: the VF-43 Challengers and VF-302 Stallions. The book's date of publication is given as 27 May 1984, so I guess it really has been around for a very long time...
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Well, yes and no... the bit about it being recommissioned as the first new battleship of the postwar UN Forces fleet is there, and it doesn't directly contradict what's said in Master File about Britai's ship being redesignated the SDF-3, but it also doesn't offer any real confirmation of the contentious bit either. It's certainly likely and it would make a lot of sense, IMO, the same as a lot of what we get in Master File... but it's not an airtight case. (Yeah, I'm splitting hairs...)
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Hm... I'd forgotten about Macross VO. Still, what gripe could Macross fans have with it? I'm legitimately drawing a blank... other than that it's not a human-built ship. The RT fans... their issues with it are probably just the usual ailment. If you are, then I am too... I'll admit to a morbid/voyeristic interest in seeing just how they're freaking out. It is... though they did throw us a tiny bone with the NUNS 33rd Marines in Macross Frontier. Didn't Kawamori say something to that effect in an interview at one point tho?
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Hm... while I could absolutely see people raising one of the two following contradictions about it, which might inspire disbelief at the most, I'm baffled that that'd receive a hostile reaction from anyone except that one group we're not supposed to talk about. The potential contradictions I'm thinking of are: In Macross: Flashback 2012, the retrofitted Nupetiet Vergnitzs-class ship with that odd bridge tower that leaves with the SDF-2 Megaroad-01 is [supposed to be/generally believed to be] Britai's old ship. That opening bit in the first couple episodes of Macross Frontier shows the SDF moniker as belonging to the Megaroad-class (though I don't recall if it actually shows a SDF-3 there... I know it shows higher numbers). For the former case, it actually makes a fair amount of sense that it'd get a battleship/dreadnaught designation like SDF since Britai's ship was supposed to have been the first Zentradi battleship recommissioned into UN Spacy service. It'd be a nice gesture to the Zentradi living on Earth too. 'course, me bein' a big Macross II fan and all... the idea of the postwar UN Spacy using captured/defecting Zentradi ships as the center of their fleet isn't exactly something eyebrow-raising for me, y'know? Maybe part of it is that the "main" chronology Macross stories don't really show Zentradi ships being used in the UN Spacy's forces in any prominent way (except for that one Neo Nupetiet Vergnitzs-class ship with Macross-5 in Macross 7 and the 33rd NUNS Marines in Macross Frontier)?
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There is nothing in this world quite as terrifying as having the trust of a multinational corporation.
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They say it the same way it's written... クラン・クラン. There's no "Gu" (グ) there, so it should be "Klan Klan".
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... there's that, yes. Other great misconceptions they're responsible for include there being no VFs between the VF-1 and VF-2 in timeline, the Macross II VFs being decades older than they actually are (and unable to fly in battroid mode), gunpods holding tens of thousands of rounds, or the Mardook being "ancient aliens" responsible for the Babylonian civilization.
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No problem! If you need my help with your project, I'm at your service. Pretty sure it's the US Renditions team we have to blame for that one.. though there are also a lot of misconceptions about the OVA that are on the head of Kevin Siembieda at Palladium Books.
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I really hope not... the Havamal paint scheme was selectable for every non-character VF model in the game... that's a LOT of repaints.
