Seto Kaiba

I am... that's the main purpose of the new server we're migrating to. This Robotech business is far and away the smallest and lowest priority part of what we have planned. The main focus of the site will be what we're semi-seriously calling the Macross Galaxy Guide... a two-part reference providing general coverage of both Macross continuities. My focus on characters and settings should provide a nice complement to Mr March's exhaustive coverage of the mechanical designs, which will also be hosted on our servers just as it is now. If only it were that easy... so long as Harmony Gold thinks there's money to be made from milking the nostalgia Robotech fans have for their mangled version of Macross, Robotech will never simply vanish.

Which is why I, being the clever chap that I am, am essentially handing over the bulk of the tedious work on the Robotech expanded universe to those who are care enough about it to provide decent coverage for it... ;-) Eh... that would be an issue if my aim was to provide a comprehensive mechanical design reference for the Robotech universe(s) similar to what the Macross Mecha Manual does for Macross. In practice, no Robotech reference would be able to pull off that level of coverage, because few official sources simply don't provide that level of detail. The goal here isn't to bludgeon the reader with in-depth technical coverage about the mecha, but rather to provide balanced coverage of all aspects of Robotech. There aren't any obstacles like that to providing story summaries, production and publication information, and character bios, since that material is all readily available and just needs to be condensed into a manageable format. Insofar as mechanical details, it's a matter of taking what little official information exists (RT.com Infopedia, AoTSC) and building on it a bit based on what's shown in the animation and RTSC production materials. For the few designs which have no official coverage, that can be remedied easily enough using the same practices the writers of the few official Robotech publications used (basically, take the hard specs from the OSM and state the obvious for a paragraph or two).

Well COME ON... all I've seen of it so far is a single thumbnail image that, on my colossal monitor, is about the size of a postage stamp.

At the risk of pointing out the obvious, opportunities to give Harmony Gold the verbal thrashing they so richly deserve are fairly common, as are venues in which to do so. What I'm doing is something else entirely. You've probably never had any cause to notice, but the official reference section of Robotech.com (the "Infopedia") is downright pathetic. The comic books and novelizations aren't mentioned at all apart from a tiny blurb and tinier cover scan in the bibliography (one of the more recent additions). The Robotech TV series is barely covered at all, with a fair few characters and mecha having no entry at all, and the rest barely getting a picture and a paragraph. The Shadow Chronicles movie section is perhaps most embarrassing of all... it consists of a one-sentence-long timeline entry for September 2044 and some recolored ships on the mecha size comparison. To compound the idiocy, the class-names of the two original ship designs were wrong for a good long time. I'm sure you can see, given the lamentable state of the official reference materials, why Robotech fans are often ignorant of fairly simple facts about their own fandom. To be rather blunt, there is a sizable body of information that just isn't available to what remains of the fanbase, and Harmony Gold doesn't give a toss because that would entail actual work or finding someone qualified who'll work for free... and their usual batch of lackeys who would gleefully work for free aren't up to the task. Overall, it's not a terribly complicated operation I'm planning here. I'm going to give them some space on my server and some bandwidth, hook them up with a Wiki and a BBS, tie the two together so they can control who can and can't edit the Wiki side through a specific usergroup on the BBS that they can control themselves, set up a couple of nice-looking basic article templates, and wade in every now and again to clear up grammar and spelling. The implementation is quite easy, and is more or less ready to roll. The only logistical hurdle left to be sorted out is finding enough people who know a fair bit about the Robotech universe(s) and are willing to work within the boundaries of canonicity I've defined for them. The main stumbling block of any Robotech project like this is defining what is and is not canon, thanks to Tommy's incredibly asinine attempt to avoid saying that all the old crap is non-canon by calling it "secondary continuity". So for my project's purposes, I've defined three particular continuities in a much more practical way than most: 1.) Current Animated Continuity (Yune-iverse) The part that the fans care about the most, the official continuity... composed of the 85 episode Robotech TV series, Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles, and those supplementary materials directly and explicitly included or referenced in that continuity: the Wildstorm comics (incl. Prelude), the Robotech II: the Sentinels "movie", and the Robotech II: the Sentinels comic book adaptation/continuation. 2.) Robotech Novelizations (McKinneyverse) Despite their many, MANY departures from the animated series, the novelizations are self-contained enough to meet the practical definition of an alternate universe, so this one's self-explanatory... everything from the novels. 3.) Robotech Comics & Games (Apocryphaverse) Of course, defining the other two universes leaves you with a big heap of poo that doesn't fit anywhere... stuff that just doesn't line up with either of the other continuities. In particular, this includes all of the pre-Wildstorm comics excluding the Waltrip bros. Sentinels series, the semi-recent Robotech video games (Battlecry, Invasion), the old and new Palladium RPGs, and the aborted/disowned Robotech animated properties... Robotech: the Untold Story and Robotech 3000... etc. It's basically a dumping ground for the inconsistent mess that makes up the majority of the Robotech expanded universe.

Okay, now this merits interest on my part... though I don't expect much more than has already been said on the People of the Mardook character sheet. If they delve into (or even build on) the material from the Kenichi Yatagai interview in B-Club 79 I'll consider it a rousing success. Either way, the art's pretty and you get points in my book for romanizing "Mardook" correctly. Even Google Translate mangles it into the name of the Babylonian god Marduk, which is not how it's supposed to be read.

Which part are you asking about? There's more than one project mentioned in that paragraph.

Oh, no kidding... even now, over half a year after getting banned from Robotech.com, I'm still getting a fair few e-mailed questions to the effect of "How does <Macross show> fit into Robotech?". If my time over on Robotech.com taught me one thing, it would be that while common sense is by no means common in the general population, it's a completely foreign concept to many Robotech fans... particularly those in Tommy Yune's corner. The Robotech universe and franchise is such a mess that it's no surprise that the fans are largely clueless. Plans for the addition of a Robotech reference section to my new servers (to which M3 will also be migrating in the near future, along with my ongoing Macross project) proceed apace, but hit a snag when I realized that there's virtually nobody qualified to write for it in the Robotech fandom anymore. Thanks to the concerted efforts of Maverick and MEMO, the few people who aspire to be knowledgeable are mainly concerned with trying to impose their own twisted moon logic on the universe and pretending to be moderators. The people outside RT.com who profess to be experts are even more clueless than the average fan, and spend most of their time talking out of their asses when they're not slandering anyone who looks at them funny. *sigh* Logistics... (Seriously, anyone got recommendations? Know anyone who's part of the exodus who might wanna contribute? I've got two or three, but I'm looking for like... eight) Yep.

On a side note, said fan was extremely offended that I had to ask him several times if he was joking before I believed he was serious about thinking Astro Plan was slated to be the next installment of Robotech. It looks like at least one person has asked the exact same question on Robotech.com's Series & Stories board. To be fair, this is probably an obscenely generous assessment... Given the current state of affairs on Robotech.com and RobotechX.com, it's looking rather like the average Robotech fan active in the fandom today barely knows anything about Robotech... to say nothing of real anime. An alarming number of them can barely be called literate...

Oddly, I got an e-mail about these videos just the other day from some confused mook on Robotech.com who was honestly taken in... he thought that Harmony Gold had (or was planning to) license Astro Plan as the next installment in the animated Robotech continuity.

Yeah, that's a good place to start. Where on Earth did you come up with "60 million"? That certainly isn't what I said, nor is it in the Compendium. The total number of survivors has pretty consistently been identified as being between a few hundred thousand and 1 million, who survived the orbital bombardment in Grand Cannon III, Grand Cannon V, the moon colony, space colonies, and inside the Macross itself.

Eh... more like a fifth of the fleet (~795,122 ships), but the principle is the same and I don't think every ship would have been taking part in the bombardment, just those with heavy anti-battleship armaments and bow-firing converging beam cannons. I get the feeling they'd probably leave the carriers and fleet pickets out of it. As Gubaba said, it's confirmed in plenty of publications on the subject. Contrary to the popular objection, they weren't working with an aggressively limited gene pool either... they had ~1 million people to choose from who survived by the simple expedient of being somewhere other than Earth's surface when it all came down. The implications of mass cloning are discussed as well... proliferation of hereditary diseases was what killed the cloning program in 2030.

Like I said, even if you were just going by the animation you'd find it pretty self-evident that you're only seeing a tiny, artificially-cultivated part of the planet... hell, the most heavily wooded part of the planet we see is Culture Park, and that place couldn't get any more obviously artificial, what with the Leaning Tower of Pisa, Great Wall of China, and the Flavian Amphitheatre being within eyeshot of each other. Eh... that might be a bit extreme... the blasted landscape in DYRL was indeed genuine Earth, albeit about twenty-one years after the fact according to Chronicle. The depopulation bit might've been for drama's sake, or Hikaru and Misa didn't know where the other Grand Cannons were, since that's where most of the refugees were. ('course in context, they wouldn't have gone to Alaska since there was a fairly large city there at the time the movie was filmed) ;-) Welcome to light sci-fi... kindly check your real-world physics at the door. Seriously though, since it's exotic energy harvested from another dimension it might not need to play by the same rules things native to our own dimension do. Mr March and I had a discussion on that note, and one of the theories proposed was that the super dimension energy cannons were a sort of focused "eruption" of super dimension space into normal space. Any way you shake it, the big ones occupy the same class of destructive potential as nukes. We can always do the Treknobabble thing and assign it some exotic extradimensional particle too if need be. It's all good so long as we differentiate between them and normal particle beam guns like those of the VF-4, Tomahawk, etc. True... but after a little while Eden was launching colony fleets too, one of which was Macross Galaxy. (While the colonization graphic in the Macross Frontier series might not be entirely accurate, it does list Macross-6, -9, -11, -14, -15, -17, -20, -21, and -23 as being launched from Eden, and according to the Macross Generation drama CD, the Eden-developed Macross-9 was also the pioneer of the bioplant system)

Well... that was faster than I anticipated. I know I wasn't the only one who figured it was only a matter of time before HG tried to exploit Macek's death to cover their ineptitude or promote the brand, but I didn't think that even they would stoop that low that quickly. For pity's sake, the man wasn't even dead a week before Harmony Gold started exploiting his death to promote their crappy movie. That whole "memorial" is just in appallingly bad taste... the plug for the movie is more than twice the length of Carl's "accomplishments".

Actually, the terminology used would seem to suggest that, like the U.N. Spacy's shipboard beam turrets, the Zentradi's shipboard turrets are scaled-down versions of the heavy converging beam cannon (AKA a super dimension energy cannon, like the Macross's main gun). If this is the case, they're shooting beams of super dimension energy rather than charged particles. The result is the same insofar as leaving behind radiation. I do agree that, given what Bodolza says when he shows that video of an orbital bombardment to Hikaru and company, that the intent was probably to sterilize the entire planet in short order, and they just didn't get that far.

Eh... it's possible the Earth's environment could eventually recover from the damage caused by the orbital bombardment during Space War 1. If left to its own devices it could hundreds of thousands, or millions, of years to sort itself out, but as humanity is giving it a helping hand, it could whittle that down to mere centuries. I don't think the radiation is a big issue, since they don't play it up as though it's at a harmful level in DYRL. Sterilization of the soil by the heat and radiation was probably a bigger issue for the reclamation effort. If the planet was completely unrecoverable, the U.N. would probably have ordered the ~1,000,000 survivors of the war to evacuate offworld to Apollo Base and the space colony clusters. So, in short... your "evidence" that the Earth's environment has recovered by the events of Macross II is that the OVA doesn't depict any of the blasted wasteland seen in DYRL? I hate to break it to you, but true to form your assertion is nothing more than speculation with no basis in fact. In both Macross 2036 and Macross: Eternal Love Song, those areas of the planet seen in the game fall into two categories: "city" and "blasted wasteland". The city is shown as having plenty of artificially-cultivated plant life, but outside of that the planet seems to be no better off than it was back around 2010. Barring the few seconds of dogfight over the ocean, all of Macross II's Earth-side events occur in an area barely 100km in diameter. You never see any other part of the planet except that tiny area containing the city, the artificial island housing U.N. Spacy headquarters, and Culture Park. To put it in perspective for you, that little parcel of land you're claiming is proof that the planet's environment recovered is less than 10,000 square kilometers... less than 0.002% of the Earth's total surface area. No, the problem here is that you present your theories as though they were facts, and don't bother to check to see if the conclusions you've arrived at are accurate. The published material and animation are two sides of the same coin, and I don't ignore either one. In this case, you're jumping to a conclusion that isn't supported by the animation or the printed materials.

Now, if memory serves (and Sketchley, correct me if I'm misremembering here) Chronicle suggested that the Earth seen during DYRL was what Earth looked like circa 2031, so it seems that the planet wasn't exactly recovering swiftly. It jives with the landscapes we see in Macross Plus... a barren, cratered desert. Of course, we don't really get a full picture of the postwar landscape in any of the Macross shows, so we don't know whether or not the planet is entirely barren, or whether, as in the TV series, there were areas of forest and such that were largely undamaged. Um... your basis for this assertion is what? Just as in the main continuity, we only see a narrow slice of Earth's surface in Macross II... just the city, which was built from salvaged Zentradi warships, the artificial island serving as U.N. Forces HQ, and Culture Park... all artificially cultivated areas.

Rather a different kettle of particularly stupid fish. It'd be particularly unwise to lump them in with the ordinary fan rabble and convention-goers, as their particular ailment isn't simple ignorance... it's an unthinking faith in Tommy Yune and the belief that lying to their fellow fans, threatening fans who question the lies, harassing the fans who criticize their jackass behavior, and slandering people who out them as liars are all justified in the name of defending Tommy Yune, Harmony Gold, and Robotech from anyone who doesn't think they're wonderful. Because Harmony Gold holds the trademark on the Super Dimension Fortress Macross name and logo in the US and a few other places. Bandai Visual would have to obtain permission from, and presumably pay royalties to, Harmony Gold for use of the trademarked name and logo if they were to release Macross: Do You Remember Love? in any region where Harmony Gold's trademarks are enforceable.

Of course... if Harmony Gold actually had the distribution rights to Macross: Do You Remember Love? they would've gotten it out there ASAP as both a slam dunk sales-wise and a means of appeasing the Macross fans who were busy verbally tearing them several new orifices of indeterminate purpose and usefulness. The whole "we can release X as a product" business is a skillful way of muddying the waters by picking a vague way of saying "we can make toys, comic books, and other merchandise based on X" that sounds like "we have control of, and can release, X in any way we see fit".

For Tommy Yune, it's a thoroughly typical convention panel Q&A response... it doesn't actually answer the question being asked and the vague, awkward wording makes it easy for die-hard Robotech fans and imbecilic panel attendees to interpret it to mean something other than what he literally said. The die-hard Robotech fans are so easy to mislead and so willing to be misled that deflecting questions of licensing in derivative works by talking about merchandising rights has become Tommy's standard tactic for dealing with any questions about their inability to use Macross.

You definitely should have gone with "But I don't want any pineapple salad" for your original #1. It would have been funnier. I'm sure some people found it offensive, but these days it's a virtual guarantee that if you're going to speak you'll offend someone... no matter what you say. Carl was a public figure, and as a public figure you're not exempt from parody, no matter what your circumstances are. I thought it was a spectacular dig at Harmony Gold as a whole, their endorsement of fanatical hate in the Robotech fanbase, and Carl's own refusal to admit that the practices which created Robotech didn't stand the test of time. To be fair... considering the things you've done in the name of antagonizing dougbendo, I think you've long since forfeited the right to complain about anyone else's off-color humor.

Hmmm... so you can't just walk into Mordor, but you can get a nice connecting flight to there?

Eh... to be fair, Genesis Climber Mospeada probably would've been a much more interesting show if they hadn't fallen victim to executive meddling at the behest of their toy partner and put more emphasis on transforming fighter jets. Fear not... I have preserved taksraven's epic trollage for posterity. http://www.macross2.net/temp/ForTheLulz.png

Odds are they decided not to go with it for the same reason they only produced a single wrap-up OVA... despite the small but loyal fanbase the original Mospeada had, the merchandise just didn't sell. Robotech's New Generation saga suffered almost exactly the same fate. Among Robotech fans, it's a distant second to Macross, with a small but loyal following, and merchandise that just doesn't sell. Look at the Robotech.com store... the Macross Saga MPCs sold out frighteningly fast, while some of the Alphas have been in the store for YEARS without selling out. Okay... lol. I was trying to be kind to Mospeada, since even it compares favorably to Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles.

While I'm no expert on aerodynamics, the way the Macross Chronicle sheet presents those numbers makes it look like a transposition error that they then went back and tried to justify, rather than something they'd initially intended to do. The original numbers are much more consistent with what we've come to expect from "leader" models in Macross. Only one digit actually changed between the two models... the VF-19F took the VF-19S's atmospheric thrust limitation and then stuck a 7 where the 6 should be, while the VF-19S's took its normal thrust rating, omitted the atmospheric limitation, and replaced the leading 7 in the normal thrust rating with a 6.

It looks like it's a proper noun. I've been looking around for around 20 minutes and haven't been able to find anything it translates to. Sketchley's using the straight-up romanization on his stats site.