Seto Kaiba
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Naturally. All I said was that the presence of internal launcher systems and/or ordinance stowage space is not, in and of itself, representative of any sweeping technological advancement. It can, as you've pointed out, be a function of technological advancement in other areas (passive stealth, for instance), but it can also just as easily not be a factor at all... like how improvements in active stealth on the VF-19 eliminated the need to keep the plane's weapons close to or completely inside the airframe (the Super Pack being the particular focus of that remark). (In general terms, you're absolutely right... I'm just being very specific.) Oy... now that is a tall order. I've been trying to corner him for a while now to talk updates, but we keep missing each other like ships in the night. I'm loathe to do any updates without him, since my art-fu is weak and M3 is his baby. I know the 2092 thing is up there, and has been for a while, but I've got a boatload of material for the Macross II section and I'm slowly accumulating a pile of art stock and material to go into the Macross Frontier movie area and a little stuff that's tentatively for Game and Advanced Valkyrie. It's just a matter of catching him. (Anyone wanna loan me a really big net?) Macross II... yeah, that's a timeline that wildly diverges from where the main timeline is. The influence of Gundam is much stronger and rather more overt and conspicuous there. I had a couple LOL moments reading B-Club 73 and seeing that some of the technological advances which were built into the Valkyrie II family (VF-XX, VF-2A/J/S, VF-2SS, VF-2JA) would probably sound suspiciously familiar to our boy Amuro Ray. No doubt it has lots and lots to do with Macross II's mechanical designers having largely come from Gundam projects like Zeta Gundam and Char's Counterattack. (It's even more blatant if you look at how Chronicle dates it, with Macross II set in what would be "New Era" 0079-0080.) You'd be absolutely bang-on accurate with your counterargument here if it weren't for one little thing... you're assuming that these railguns are using internal batteries as their power source. True, a railgun is going to need huge amounts of energy to achieve a level of accuracy, range, and lethality exceeding that of a more conventional cannon, but energy is one commodity that the Valkyrie II has in spades. It's one of only two VFs in Macross to have a stated reactor output, the other being the VF-1, and that output is huge. Each of its two main reaction turbines has a power output that's just shy of 2,000MW... and since the Valkyries in the "DYRLverse" are armored with ersatz-Gundarium instead of a combination of composite armor and energy conversion armor*, all of that output is free for things like flight and weaponry. So, when your power source is external and frankly excessive, you can achieve the greater destructive potential without having to make the gun pod unmanagably large or aggressively curtailing the magazine capacity to make room for large capacitor banks. EDIT: * It occured to me to clarify this only after I had posted. Macross Chronicle's glossary section asserts that energy conversion armor doesn't exist in the Macross II universe. It's not that they're voluntarily not using it, it's that it flat-out doesn't exist. As a brief aside, the notion of supplying power from an external source for a particularly energy-intensive gun pod isn't unique to Macross II's parallel universe. IIRC, that's how the VF-0's gun pod motor was powered, and the equipment for the YF-27-5 prototype from Macross the Ride makes it look very probable that the VF-27's gun pod is also powered by a tap into the mecha's four engines. (In that case, it's also highly probable that the SSL-9 railgun used by the VF-25 is powering its linear driver off the mecha's engines too.)
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Um, the Macross II: Lovers Again OVA is set in 2092, not 2089. I've been trying for a while now to track down which American-side entity originated the 2089 thing, and thus far the finger seems to be pointed squarely at US Renditions. Anyhoo... I'm not denying that the Valkyries in the main Macross universe are, in most respects, more advanced than those of the Macross II parallel universe. What I'm saying is that engine power isn't the only metric for measuring technological advancement, and that the Macross II valks did have certain areas where they were more advanced than the VFs in the main universe. Both universes had integrated beam weapons turn up at the same time and on the same plane (the VF-4), while things like internalized micro-missile launchers aren't an indicator of technological progression so much as they're an indicator of simply having a larger airframe and thus more internal space. Things like pinpoint barriers, fold wave radar, and all of that jazz... heck yes, that's more advanced than what's on the Valkyrie II. Then again, there are areas where the Macross II valks have a leg-up on their counterparts: like the widespread use of railguns in place of conventional guns, every Valkyrie II being able to act as a mothership for drones rather than just recon variants, the much earlier emergence of those drone-support and beam rifle technologies, etc.. Skipping right to the moral of the story, the question of which timeline's Valkyries are superior depends largely on what criteria you're applying when you're judging what superiority means. As a result, it can easily go either way. Well, let's examine this in detail... the YF-29 has a beam rifle, two machine guns, two beam cannons, its internal micro-missile launchers, and a big damn knife. On the other hand, the VA-1SS has a pair of railguns, two laser cannons, two beam cannons, its internal micro-missile launchers, and what's essentially a big damn energy spear on one arm. All told, they're on pretty level ground in terms of dakka except for the question of missile capacity (the Durendal's lead is by about 36 missiles). Heck, their armament is surprisingly similar in terms of where it's placed on the airframe too, 'cept for the gunpods. Talk about a failure of context... Macross II is a six-episode OVA about a war, while Macross Plus is a four-episode OVA exclusively about the development of new variable fighters, and Macross 7 is a 49+ episode TV series. That's not exactly a fair comparison to make. Macross II does discuss certain aspects of the technological improvements (e.g. railguns) in the published material, the same as Macross Plus and others do.
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Oh, absolutely it does. Just for starters, the practical advantages of railgun technology over conventional guns is an area being avidly explored by real national milities including the US Navy. It's also been a factor in the program histories multiple Macross mecha like the Monster destroids, the Defender EX, and was a factor in the (re)design of the Valkyrie II platform as a space-optimized variable fighter. In a limited fashion, it also comes into play in the VF-25G's choice of armament. (In the last case, the particular emphasis is on the increase in ballistic velocity over what chemical propellant can make possible and the resulting improvement in accuracy and penetration power, whereas the Valkyrie II's case is focused more on the excessive power that made it possible for a Valkyrie to pose a real threat to enemy ships without resorting to reaction ordinance.)
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Oh, absolutely... we've never seen a gun pod in the main Macross universe that could do what the gun pods in Macross II do. Even the railgun on the VF-25G needs a propellant of some description to get the bullet moving, and almost all of the gun pods in the main Macross universe need a cartridge case to keep the whole affair together. Macross II's railguns need neither, reducing the materials requirements to manufacture ammunition and letting them operate without the limitations of a conventional gun... and opening up possibilities like significantly greater velocities than what can be achieved with chemical propellants, faster rates of fire, etc.
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*cough* Um... remember that thing I just said about the VF-4 doing it first? Yeah, the Valkyrie II's weird in that it goes against the usual convention of the battroid being shorter than the fighter is long. The Valkyrie II's 14m in battroid mode, and only 13.5m in fighter... a full 14m if you factor in the Super Armed Pack's big damn railgun.
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So, in short, nothing has changed and there's been no progress whatsoever for Robotech, yes? It gives me a sense of great peace and stability to know that there are certain universal constants, and that Robotech's inability to produce anything remotely resembling success is one of them.
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Erm... what? The YF-21 had beam weapons, yes... but not beam gun pods. If you check the Compendium (or anywhere else), you'll find that the YF-21's gun pods are listed as "Two external Howard/General GV-17L new standard cartridge-less gatling guns". Internal beam weapons weren't anything new when the YF-21 came out, that'd been a thing since the VF-4 in both universes. As far as internal missile bays, that's not really that advanced... its only indicative of the fact that the VF-19, VF-22, etc. are about twice the size of a VF-2SS. EDIT: Pretty much the only type of built-in weapon main timeline Valks have that M2 ones don't is miniaturized converging beam guns, MDE weapons not counting because they're just different ammunition in an existing machine gun or an externally-mounted beam gun.
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Dear god, this thread is still going? How much non-news can we reasonably report? As I understand it, it also "killed the radio star".
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Sure thing. I've had consistently good experiences with HMV.co.jp's English side. Actually, they're lagging pretty far behind Macross II's universe in both respects. The designated marksman railgun (SSL-9B Dragunov) used on the VF-171 and VF-25G in the Macross Frontier series isn't a true ("pure") railgun, its ammunition uses chemical cartridges to get the round moving and then accelerates it further with the linear driver in the barrel. Also, the Macross II universe had beam weapon gun pods as early as the 2030s, which were seen in the Macross II prequel game Macross: Eternal Love Song.
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An outcome that, I think, surprises nobody... Eh? Lack of advancement? Engine output and g-force loadings aren't the only measures of technological advancement in Macross. The Valkyrie II and the other "DYRLverse" mecha are more advanced than the main Macross universe's mecha in some areas, and less so in others. For instance, while the main universe's VFs have far greater advances in engine output, their weapons technology has lagged behind compared to the Macross II mecha, which have advanced railgun tech to the point where they've outright replaced rotary gun pods, etc.. There are also a couple areas wherein technologies overlap, like a "smart" anti-g seat/frame with integrated controls, improvements to the transformation system that dramatically increase durability, etc. Better late than never, right? ^^; (It's been a hectic month.) More or less, yeah... the Macross II universe's UN Spacy seems to have judged the VF-1 sufficient to continue in operation as a main VF during the reconstruction of Earth, serving alongside the VF-4 before eventually receiving a major overtechnology upgrade and becoming the VF-1 Kai (known also as the VF-1R "Refined Valkyrie" family). The VF-4 got a similar upgrade around the same time, which gave it a lot of new tech that'd eventually end up being developed further in VF-XX/VF-2 generation and show up on the Valkyrie II's space-optimized version. (Funnels becoming bits, etc.) Actually... the VF-2SS wasn't developed until the early 2080s. Depending on how you want to split it, it's either the 4th or the 7th VF in Macross II's universe to see large-scale mass production. (It depends on whether you wanna count the refined versions as separate planes in their own right or variants of a basic platform... ie. whether the VF-1 and VF-1R, VF-4 and VF-4S, or VF-2S and VF-2SS are the same planes despite the significant changes in their hardware and airframe design. It's a lot like whether you wanna count the Hornet and Super Hornet as the same or separate planes.)
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Actually, the design for the whatever-you-wanna-call-it the Galaxy bigwigs "live" in looks a LOT like the brains on the command deck of Ingues's mobile fortress in Macross II: Lovers Again.
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Other numbers are shown on 'em in the animation proper... a smaller number stencil under the canopy frame on the side of Max's bird is "SV-003" (presumably Skull/Vermillion 003").
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IIRC, isn't the Stampede Valkyrie an acknowledged inspiration for the VF-25?
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Honestly, that'd be about the only intelligent move left to Harmony Gold at this point... but they'll never do it. One of the sordid little truths that leaked out during the more candid discussions with the people in charge of Robotech is that Harmony Gold's senior management ascribe to a view of the franchise more in line with ours than the highly unrealistic and/or overly optimistic viewpoint being pushed by the idiot brigade they hired to run the franchise. To them, Robotech is just a poor performer with such lousy future prospects that it's not worth investing more than the bare minimum necessary to keep it alive enough to continue generating revenue. As wise as it would be for them to let Robotech slip into obscurity and obsolescence to clear its reputation of the stink of all its failures and the bad karma, the decision-makers at Harmony Gold are also businessmen. Despite all its many sins, Robotech continues to generate a modest income stream from products whose development costs have been covered for decades. To bring the franchise to full-stop for years before trying to reboot it from the ground up would entail both the loss of the revenue stream it currently generates AND a significant investment of time, money, and resources into reviving a property with a 100% catastrophic failure rate in developing original material. Since they know Robotech is a turd with no prospects, they're clearly realists... they'll stick with the assured profits rather than gambling on the uncertain and almost certainly doomed promise of future profits.
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Dunno what the madmen of the Robotech.com Ghost Town preservation society are saying, but the more moderate fans over on Palladium's forums seem surprisingly reluctant to talk about it. The few I've managed to wrangle an opinion out of seem to be of the opinion that it's going to be a turd.
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Oh, no kidding... the more I read of what Carl Macek had to say about Robotech before and after Harmony Gold decided that the time was ripe to "reboot" their failed toy commercial from the 80's and try to pass it off as a completely serious sci-fi/action anime series, the more I think that Carl Macek was basically nothing more than a sock puppet that Harmony Gold used for the purpose of promoting the show and disparaging the original Macross. After his final attempt to revive Robotech got canned in pre-production by Harmony Gold and he was replaced as the creative director by Tommy Yune, his "tune" in interviews and such pulled a 180. He went from the way he was in the late 80's and the early 90's, which was being essentially honest about the show's origins and his involvement, to suddenly buying into the hype that he was anime's answer to Gene Roddenberry and disparaging the source material for Robotech as flawed and inferior to what he envisioned for it. If he really was their sock puppet for all that, it would certainly explain some of the outrageous and fairly obvious lies he told. Still... 's kind of a dick move to repeat a bad idea from the past and then stick a dead man with the blame.
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While it doesn't scare me or even particularly surprise me that Harmony Gold is stupid enough to try the same bad idea twice on the forlorn hope that it'll work the second time around despite being seen as bad practice by the industry in general on top of all the bad ideas related to its execution, I have to say that the part that surprises me is that they preemptively assigned the blame for its inevitable crash-and-burn failure to Carl Macek. Does it strike anyone else as odd that, after spending close to a decade twisting the truth and heaping lies and hosts of largely undeserved plaudits on Macek to an extent verging on hagiography, they'd take the time to ensure he got all the blame for the ill-conceived stopgap title they're trying to use as a smokescreen for their lack of progress elsewhere.
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It does, but we're putting a priority on the Macross II stuff... since all the translation legwork on that is done. It's just a matter of finding the free time to finish the web design portion of things. Maybe over the holiday break, since the free time I was supposed to have this past week or two vanished into a minor family emergency.
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Yes and no... I've got most of the material written and waiting to be reviewed by helpful souls like Talos, but the site design has been moving at a slower pace than I'd like because I've been absolutely slammed at my day job. We're strongly considering an alternative approach that would expand the coverage into the "main timeline" too, sort of as a characters and continuity version of what M3's done for mecha.
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"Klan Klang" is how it's usually romanized in official publications. (IIRC, a literal reading of the kana for her name is "Klan Klan")
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Likewise, I've got a pretty extensive library to draw on... my main timeline collection's grown by leaps and bounds now that I've finished my Macross II research. You'd be correct in your assumption... none of the Macross Frontier movie stuff is printed in Macross Chronicle (or I'd have it covered already). The annoying part is that it's not in the movie art books either. I was kinda hoping that they got printed in a magazine article somewhere (maybe a Newtype issue, or Great Mechanics, I know they're not printed in DX.17), but I've had no luck turning up clean art of Michel's VF-25G w/ Tornado Packs or the movie version of what the series called the VF-171EX.
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Now that's something that Talos and I talked about at some length... Right now, the Macross Mecha Manual's basically only covering what's unambiguously canon in Macross, barring a few minor entries over in the Game and Advanced Valkyrie section. One the the things Talos was eagerly pitching was the idea that we could/should add another section for alternate continuity and manga materials. Stuff like Macross the First's special versions of the VF-1D and VF-1J, Kamjin's ship with the tentacles, that sort of thing, maybe some of the stuff from Macross Mechatronics, unused but polished concept art like Kazumi Fujita's VF-XS Valkyrie II concept that showed up in Animage before Macross II came out. It's definitely a possibility, but it's one we gotta explore with His Marchness before we proceed.
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I'm a patient guy... I can put the preorder confirmation under the tree and wait a week. Definitely gonna get the Visual Book, the last one was totally worth it even if I did get tenderized on the cost of shipping. If it's like the last one, it'll give me cleaner art stock to give to March for M3.
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Huh, I'd forgotten about that one. Yeah, definitely. That should go in the Macross 7 section if, as has been proposed, we're gonna add stuff from M7T to the site.
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Thanks guys! That had us scratching our heads for a bit.
