Seto Kaiba

Calling it my "preferred date" wouldn't exactly do it justice... particularly since when you examine the official chronology published in B-Club 79 and the dialogue of the OVA itself, 2092 is the ONLY date where everything actually works out. It certainly doesn't hurt my feelings any that the booklet Japanese edition of the soundtrack says flat-out that Macross II is set in 2092 either. It's somewhat unsurprising that books like Macross Ace and Macross Chronicle are somewhat inconsistent in dating Macross II, as neither one seems to have bothered paying much attention to stuff outside of the OVA itself. Exactly how we arrived at 2092 as the year in which the Macross II: Lovers Again OVA is set was, as I said, by a combination of dialogue from the show and one particularly important date in the official series chronology. Both Hibiki and Mash establish that roughly eighty years have passed since the end of Space War 1, which gives us a lower bound for the date of 2090. What firmly establishes the date is the last Zentradi invasion, the one that inspired Hibiki to study journalism, which occurred ten years before the events of the OVA. The chronology the OVA's creators developed as a means of linking Macross II to DYRL firmly places the last Zentradi incursion in 2082. It doesn't take a minor in applied mathematics to deduce that 2082 + 10 = 2092. It's also pretty bloody obvious these numbers weren't chosen arbitrarily... the 10 years is obviously significant (it IS the 10th Anniversary OVA after all), and when you subtract 100 (10^2) from both dates you get 1982 and 1992, which as we all know are the release dates for the Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series and the Macross II: Lovers Again OVA respectively.

So far, I haven't been able to find any canon explanation for what "NUNS" stands for in Macross II, though nothing thus far has addressed the military in the OVA as the "New U.N. Spacy", not even Macross Chronicle. The service patch located on the right arm of the standard uniform is generally obscured at least partially, so most of the time it's illegible, leaving us to go by the lineart which shows only two variants of it... one which reads SPACY, and the other which reads ARMY, the latter having only one example... the khaki-clad guy commanding the destroid defenses. Exactly what branch those other guys in "Zentradi green" and dark green belong to is something of a mystery, as are the baby blue uniforms briefly seen in the peace treaty scene. (My guess would be U.N. Zentradi forces, U.N. Marines, and U.N. Air Force respectively) I know... what I'm saying is that these design elements were fairly common in "real robot" mecha anime prior to the development of Macross Zero and Macross Frontier, so it's somewhat unlikely that Macross II inspired either. Yeah, in the very first issue Macross Ace tacked Macross II onto the back end of the timeline as occurring in 2090. How they expected it to fit is anybody's guess.

It certainly doesn't help that there're one or two extra branches of the service that appear to be redundant or otherwise somewhat unclear in their particular role... the one that leaps to mind being the U.N. Spacy Air Force, which has no clear reason for existing. After all, we already have both a U.N. Spacy and U.N. Air Force, to say nothing of the U.N. Army, the U.N. Navy, the U.N. Marines, and the U.N. Spacy Marines. So far, at least four branches of the service could easily offer a reasonable justification for the inclusion of destroid units among their ranks. Obviously, the U.N. Spacy could justify their use as mobile air defense platforms on their larger ships and for the odd ARMD/Daedalus/Macross Attack, which may or may not fall be the jurisdiction of the U.N. Spacy Marines. Likewise, both the U.N. Army and U.N. Marines could make a case for the inclusion of destroid armored units for ground combat (their intended purpose, after all) and as ad-hoc anti-aircraft emplacements for the defense of planetside bases, naval vessels, and cities in the event that things go seriously pear-shaped and their opponents (Zentradi, Mardook, etc.) make it past the fleet and the orbital defenses (as they did in Macross II). As to who actually owns the destroids... in the main continuity the finger seems to be pointed primarily at the U.N. Spacy, given that even the early ADR-03 Cheyennes used aboard the Asuka II bore the legend "U.N. SPACY" on their gun arms, and all subsequent models in Super Dimension Fortress Macross are listed as operating under the U.N. Spacy as well. Other branches might have their own, but the ones we've seen so far belong to the Spacy. In the parallel world continuity's Macross II: Lovers Again OVA, we're offered possible evidence of more than one branch of the service using destroids at one time... with the battleship-based destroids likely serving under the auspices of the U.N. Spacy and the ground-based units under the command of a U.N. Army officer.

Hmmm... the worst science fiction book of all time? Considering the sheer volume of piss-dribblingly bad sci-fi on bookstore shelves these days, singling out the worst of the bad lot is going to be no mean feat. At the very least, each and every one of the licensed Star Trek novels and the Star Wars expanded universe novels deserves a (dis)honorable mention either for bordering on the unreadable or being the very worst kind of fanwankery, if not both. Also noteworthy is the Ultramarines series of Warhammer 40,000 novels by Graham McNeill, whose dubious talents as a wordsmith have brought forth a protagonist who is so profoundly one-dimensional that he isn't just impossible to like... he's impossible to relate to in any way, shape, or form. While it certainly feels like reaching for the low-hanging fruit, it would be remiss of me not to also nominate the Robotech novelizations written by James Luceno and Brian Daley under the pseudonym "Jack McKinney", as their Sentinels books could quite easily be called one of the worst crimes against the English language since the invention of ebonics. I would also include Like a Phoenix From the Flames: The Founding of the 597th and Like a Phoenix on the Wing: The Early Campaigns and Glorious Victories of the Valhallan 597th by General Jenit Sulla, though they (and the truly staggering amounts of overly purple prose they contain) must be excused on the grounds that the books themselves are fictional, and only "excerpts" from them were ever actually published in the Ciaphas Cain novels written by Alex Stewart under the penname "Sandy Mitchell". That having been said, my nominee for the worst science fiction book ever written is The Return, a Star Trek novel penned by William Shatner after the release of Star Trek: Generations. In this horrid crime against both the Star Trek franchise and the literary arts as a whole, the author (Mr. Shatner) takes it upon himself to unkill James T. Kirk and involve him in a pointlessly overcomplicated plot by a Borg-Romulan alliance to assassinate Jean-Luc Picard, allowing him to indulge in a series of Mary Sue-esque antics like beating up Worf, outwitting Data, and dying gloriously while singlehandedly crippling the entire Borg collective and sucker-punching Picard to show him who's boss. Of course... Shatner didn't let Kirk STAY dead... and promptly revived him with an almost equally bullshit excuse in the next novel, only to be dragged into the Mirror Universe to confront his alternate self, who has become the ruler of the Terran Empire.

I'm kind of astonished that, blunt as I am about most things, that you need me to reiterate it... but okay, I'm game. My point here is that while you are entitled to your opinion and all that, you're basing your objections (or rather, grievances) on a series of faulty assumptions... namely, comparing destroid training and its inherent costs to much lower-tech real world equipment and the training necessary to use it, and the particularly odd choice of the US Army as a model, when Macross's creators are Japanese, and thus modeled some elements of the U.N. Spacy on the SDF (most noticably, rank insignia in the DYRL scheme). Yes, but that doesn't necessarily mean that all VF pilots (or destroid pilots for that matter) attend a military academy or even anything beyond their basic training. That all VF pilots must be officers who graduated from a military academy is demonstrably faulty, as we have the previously-offered evidence that not all pilots are officers, and that the training to operate a VF in combat definitely does not require years of study. Well, you have to consider things like the current military situation (quite a few Macross pilots have been trained or had their training abbreviated during a time of war, incl. Hikaru Ichijyo, Maximilian Jenius, Hayao Kakizaki, Komilia Maria Jenius (M2036), Lott Sheen, Hayato Kiryu, etc. etc. etc.) and other concerns like changes in technology. Ostensibly, one of the primary motivations for equipping EX-Gear is to make the fighters easier for pilots to control and facilitate training cutbacks without significantly impairing their performance in the field. One does have to wonder how the EX-Gear might improve the destroids of the era too... since they don't have to worry about concerns like transforming I'd imagine that weak variant of the BCS might drastically improve their performance and accuracy... but that's just my particular hypothesis. Okay, let's not ASSUME anything. Assumptions invariably come back to bite the one doing the assuming in the arse. We have a post-facto statement that the VF-17 was somewhat difficult to control compared to the VF-171. That is pretty much the only VF actually singled out as abnormally difficult to operate in any way, barring prototypes which would not be mass produced. Whether the VF-17 is ACTUALLY difficult to control or just more difficult than the VF-171 is kind of ambiguous. 'kay... let's go back and re-read that citation, the VF-19 isn't singled out like the VF-17 is. It's mentioned that the YF-19 was difficult, but that usability was improved in the mass-production model, so that leaves our one and only problem child being the VF-17, a special forces bird that no rookie has any business being in unless they're hot poo already. It would've been nice for Macross Frontier to use something newer than the Cheyenne, but it was only going to be a background mecha anyway, and they already had a 3D model for it... so waste not, want not. Thank you, I do try... Something that will always perplex me... though not quite as much as EB51 sparing a thought for how the Giant Monster (or as Chronicle mistakenly calls it, the Monster II) moves on the deck of a carrier, but it never actually appears on one (that I've been able to discern). I gotta admit, I find the Defender EX to be possibly the single most frightening AA unit the U.N. Spacy's ever produced... if only because it's an anti-aircraft unit armed with four anti-battleship railguns.

The guys writing Macross Ace already tried... though they got the date Macross II is set in wrong.

At the risk of pointing out the obvious, the U.N. Spacy is not the U.S. Army, and destroids are not tanks. You can belabor this all you wish, but it won't make your assertion any less faulty. Again, pointing out obvious facts you've tried to shift aside... not all Valkyrie pilots are officers. Prior to his promotion to 2nd Lt, Hikaru held the rank of Staff Sergeant. Hayao Kakizaki and Maximilian Jenius were also NCOs, prior to Kakizaki's death and Jenius's string of promotions. You're drawing another false conclusion about the training and status of Valkyrie pilots. If only because it doesn't necessarily include piloting. One would imagine the most difficult part would be in common between the two programs... piloting a giant walker without falling on your ass. What WAS true for Gamlin may not necessarily hold true for academies on all colony worlds, or in different parts of the timeline... one would imagine training would be somewhat abbreviated in the SW1 era and immediate aftermath, and it was reportedly reduced by the time the NUNS rolled around, due to the increased emphasis on unmanned combat units (AIF-7S/AIF-9V Ghost). Joy... here we go with citations to prove a point that never had a factual basis to begin with. As I said in my previous post, the difficult-to-operate VFs are the EXCEPTION rather than the RULE. In fact, you even cited proof of what I was saying unintentionally. Yes, the VF-171's ease of control was a major factor in its adoption as the NUNS's main VF, its predecessor, the VF-17 Nightmare, was a special forces bird... not the sort of thing you hand over to an average pilot, and definitely not something you give to a rookie. My point still stands. Also, your assertion about the VF-19 disproves your own argument, as the only difficult-to-control member of that design family is the YF-19 prototype, and as I said, prototypes don't count on the grounds that they too would only be in the care of exceptionally skilled pilots. The mass production model was made substantially easier to control, thus it is not a difficult-to-operate VF. Like I said, destroids are not just ground-pounders, they're background-pounders. They appear on an as-needed basis in the story. Having an overabundance of destroids trotting around would've been detrimental to the story of the Macross 7 TV series and Macross Plus OVA, so they were simply omitted. They do appear when it suits the story for them to be there. As ground units operating in space, the number of uses they can be feasibly put to are a bit on the limited side story-wise, a problem not helped in the least by the relatively small size of most U.N. Spacy ships in the main continuity. Destroids would simply be too bulky to be an effective AA solution on all but the largest of ships, as the ships wouldn't be able to carry enough to matter, and be large targets AND get in the way of the ship's weapons as well. The largest ships, like the battle sections, would benefit from destroid coverage because they're large enough that the destroids won't get in the way of anything and can carry enough of them to make a difference. This particular issue doesn't really matter in the parallel world continuity, since the smallest U.N. Spacy ships are pushing 500m and by any reasonable estimate the standard battleship's over 900m long, thus making them large enough for destroid air defenses to be practical. Battles in Macross stories seldom take place on the ground for any length of time, so the one regime where the destroids would be most effective is almost never used... the notable exception being Macross II: Lovers Again.

Now I'm usually first in line to toot Macross II's horn, but I believe in being realistic too, so I've got a few corrections for your list where things are inaccurate or false parallels are drawn: While it's true that the acronym "NUNS" does appear in the animation of Macross II, no character ever refers to the military as the New U.N. Spacy, nor does "NUNS" appear anywhere on the uniforms of the U.N. Spacy officers. The patch worn on the right arm simply reads "SPACY", with the notable exception of the khaki-clad gentleman in who commanded Earth's ground defenses to open fire, whose shoulder patch reads "ARMY" according to the artbooks. It's speculated that "NUNS" may actually refer to the U.N. Spacy's propaganda/news bureau, as its appearances are always tied to those of news and propaganda broadcasts. I'll come back and add more to this later, as I have an obligation in about 20 minutes that I need to get ready for. It's also true that the new generation of destroid designs in Macross II are the first in Macross to sport wheels in the feet for higher mobility. It is not, however, necessarily the reason for the wheeled feet of the ADR-03 Cheyenne and Cheyenne II. It's possible, yes, especially given some of the structural similarities in the area of the arms, but back when Macross Zero was still in development, wheel-footed mecha were not exactly unheard-of. If memory serves, Blue Gender was on the air around the time development started, and the giant robots there got around almost exclusively on wheeled feet. Okay, aside from the obvious "beam sword" references one might make to Gundam SEED and the like, you might actually have a point here, at least as far as the wings go. Admittedly, the Metal Siren's wings did a lot more than just flap about increasing the mecha's target profile, they were also where the mecha kept its gunpods and also contained sub-engine systems which were used in Gundroid mode (and possibly as verniers, though they appear to have thrust vectoring flaps in the lineart). At the risk of really demolishing this one, I'm just going to point to the abundance of similar weapons in Gundam (bits, funnels, fin funnels, fangs, whathaveyou) and call it a day. Drone units under the control of a giant robot aren't anything new. Yes, the Valkyrie II was the first VF to do it, but all the same... 's not a new thing by any means.

While your line of reasoning here is almost sound, it seems highly unlikely that the training and upkeep for destroid operators isn't the same, or at least similar, from a cost perspective. The equipment itself might be more expensive (VFs are rumored to be ~20x the cost of destroids according to the artbooks), but there shouldn't be a terrible disparity in the cost to train them, since they're both living in the barracks, eating in the mess hall, and presumably draw similar benefits packages. Considering there's rather a large area of difference between operating a tracked vehicle (which doesn't really require much in the way of new skill sets to drive) and operating a ten meter tall walker, I wouldn't be so quick to make the assumption that destroid pilots are the sort of people who are churned out in vast numbers by a fifteen week training class. Of course, we could also take the opposite route and completely demolish the assertion that Valkyrie pilot training is an expensive and time consuming process by pointing out that Hikaru enlisted in the U.N. Spacy in March '09, and cleared basic AND his VF pilot training by no later than 15 April '09. Additionally, Hikaru's teammates Max and Hayao were both recent enlistees themselves, and were in service no later than 10 October '09, which assuming they were civilians prior to the Macross's departure means they would barely have had time to complete basic and a fifteen week course after the city section was finished, let alone three years at the academy. With regard to average pilots having difficulty operating some models of VF... prototypes don't count, as they would only be flown by test pilots, who are generally at least above average if not exceptional, as was the case with Isamu Alva Dyson. These designs are the exception rather than the rule, and thus should not materially impact costs related to pilot training. Destroids are background mecha with a very limited range of operational capabilities... and thus rather limited roles in the story. Macross II: Lovers Again provided enough leeway to actually fit some into the story in their common role as anti-aircraft defenses on the ground and in space. They simply weren't appropriate or necessary in Macross Plus, and Macross 7 was a less serious story, so using big shooty anti-aircraft platforms would've detracted a bit from the need for Basara to charge out there and warble his obnoxious music at them. They became appropriate again in Macross Zero, which was set during the development of the Space War 1 mecha, and stayed relevant enough in Macross Frontier out of necessity in a somewhat more serious war story with a far larger colony to defend. Granted, Macross will always be about Valkyries and pilots because Kawamori has had a long love affair with aircraft design. Destroids are just a convenient means to an end as far as the story is concerned, so they appear and disappear as necessary.

Oh you have NO idea how happy that would make me... but it'll never happen. About the best we can reasonably hope for is a VF-4 cover page. By all accounts Chronicle's editors would much rather use main timeline designs for the cover, even if they're sinfully ugly like the VB-6, VF-19 Kai, VF-11MAXL, etc. etc. etc.

Not that I'm aware of... apart from her involvement as a voice actor on the original Macross TV series and the ADV dub of same, I don't think she's ever really had anything to do with Robotech. About the closest she's ever come to direct involvement in a Robotech title is the aborted Robotech Perfect Collection VHS series which put both the Robotech rewrites and the original Macross episodes (subtitled, albeit inaccurately) on the same cassettes. Honestly, I think their reasons for inviting Mari Iijima to some of their convention tour stops are less a matter of her being relevant to Robotech and more a matter of trying to get Macross fans to attend their lame-ass panels too.

C'mon... it's Carl Macek talking. The man has spent the last twenty-five years distorting the truth and telling increasingly ridiculous lies to inflate his own importance and justify the string of failures Robotech experienced when he was still serving as the franchise's creative director. Virtually nothing the man says can be taken at face value... there's always a spin to it. Even if he said water was wet, I'd still go elsewhere to check the validity of his statements. His claim that Robotech sold better than Neon Genesis Evangelion is a textbook case of misdirection by faulty comparison. I could, for example, construct a similar bit of misdirection by saying that, to date, the Ford F-350 has sold better as a light cargo vehicle than the Ford Transit Connect in the US. On the surface, this statement is entirely honest, though it glosses over an otherwise-inconvenient fact that the fleet sales figures span ten model years while the Transit Connect has only been available for one. Now there's a ridiculous claim if ever I saw one... it's less viable to import and distribute new shows without merchandise or with limited merchandising in a niche market than it is to produce merchandise for a franchise with a rapidly shrinking fanbase that hasn't produced a viable sequel in over 25 years of trying? Maybe that's why Carl Macek got into the anime market... he couldn't pass Economics 101 in business school. The ONLY reason Robotech has been able to hang on this long is because animation is, at best, a side business to Harmony Gold. Any company specializing in production would've cut the deadweight franchise loose back in '86 when the movie bombed and Sentinels went under.

Well, it's not like any of their enemies to date have bothered with any tactic other than spraying and praying or charging directly into hand-to-hand combat... I guess they're not terribly worried about the marksmanship of their enemies after three marksmanship-free apocalyptic wars. All the same, one has to wonder exactly what value they put on their troops, especially in later wars where their pilots are either exposed when operating their giant fighting robots, or are wearing what we can only jokingly call a flightsuit that consists of only a handful of pieces of body armor and is about as airtight as a screen door.

In some cases, yes... but there are notable exceptions. Clearly SMS, and to a lesser extent the Macross Frontier fleet, felt that the use of destroids could improve their AA capabilities... hence the widespread use of updated versions of the ADR-03 Cheyenne. Um... you may want to go back and review the footage. While it's true that the majority of the screen time devoted to the destroids in Macross II depicts their use as mobile anti-aircraft defenses by the U.N.'s ground forces*, the destroids are also frequently shown operating as space-based anti-aircraft defenses aboard the U.N. Spacy's battleships.** *: It's highly probable that the destroids in question belong to the U.N. Army rather than the U.N. Spacy, as the official artbooks identify the khaki-clad officer in command of the ground-based defenses as belonging to that branch of the service. **: Quite a few examples of the U.N. Spacy's standard battleship are shown with sizable destroid complements serving as their anti-aircraft defenses. The majority are Defender EX and Phalanx Kai units, though a handful of Tomahawk IIs are also seen. It's noteworthy that while the Giant Monster is never seen operating in space, its entry in Entertainment Bible 51 identifies its means of space-based locomotion. A trend that may no longer be confined to the main continuity... for the first time we have possible size data for the destroids of Macross II, courtesy of Macross Chronicle. Chronicle's sizes put most of the destroids as being about 2m shorter than their SW1-era counterparts... with the notable exceptions of the Defender EX, which is about the same size, and the Giant Monster, which is about 3m taller than its predecessor.

In this and several other cases, it's not really a desire to make every plane, train, and automobile into a giant fighting robot... it's more like a desire to find a way to exonerate Robotech's writers of the guilt for all their poor decisions, imbecilic errors, and inconsistencies. I'd guess that the logic behind it, if it can even be called that, is that they want to figure out ways to explain away the plot errors so they can at least pretend that Robotech isn't the mess everyone says it is. It's the same thing they do when they have those long circular arguments trying to figure out where a second SDF-type ship could be in the last episode of the "Macross Saga". Actually, the "VM-9L Silverback" was created by Tommy Yune for Robotech: Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles... it's not Palladium's fault.

It's not exactly a problem limited to the Space War 1-era destroids, y'know. Unless they were equipped with plot armor because they were carrying a named character, Zentradi beam weapons tended to do pretty much the same thing to the lightly-armored Valkyries of the day as well. Even plot armor didn't save Hikaru's VF-1J from being torn to shreds during hand-to-hand combat, and the only other major instance of Valkyries going into hand-to-hand combat was faked for the benefit of Quamzin... whereas the Spartan at least comported itself reasonably well after the war as a police unit for the specific mission of controlling violent Zentradi.

Okay, I'm having a bit of trouble untangling your wording there, so if I reach any wrong conclusions about your intended meaning, please don't hesitate to correct me. It's one thing for the powers that be on Harmony Gold's creative staff to be tinkering with the technological continuity of the series in an effort to impose a sense of technological progression on the disparate parts of the Robotech TV series. After all, perpetuating the illusion that all the various stories of RT fit into something that at least resembles a unified whole is their job. When the fans start intruding on it with the sort of logic we normally reserve for recent victims of cranial drill intrusion, latching onto awkwardly structured lines and dialogue errors with the single-minded desire to see a deeper meaning that simply isn't there, and then tout that view as though it were anything other than wild speculation, it really says something about the fandom as a whole. There are so many fans who just don't want to accept that Robotech is a hastily assembled amalgam of three unrelated shows, and that because the amalgamation process was done on the fly it's shot through with errors. While I do respect Brooklyn Red Leg rather more than the average Robotech fan, I have to say in this instance I'm really finding his logic to be more than a little on the screwball side. The argument he's proposing has the same chain of logic as the following, simpler, example. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that we have a hypothetical scene in Robotech where Rick Hunter is sitting in his little modular house eating an apple when Minmei calls. The narrator then says that Rick set down the orange he was eating to talk to her. Was Rick eating an apple or an orange? A sensible viewer would say "well, he's clearly shown to be eating an apple, so it must be a dialogue error". Brooklyn Red Leg's argument is that regardless of what's shown on the screen the dialogue overrides it even in the absence of corroborative evidence, so Rick was eating a nice Florida orange that just happened to be hard, red, and oblong instead of soft, orange, and round.

Internet... serious business. Speaking of Robotech and "lol serious business", I received another private message from our esteemed (or rather, steamed off) friend Brooklyn Red Leg expressing his displeasure with my summation of his argument for the Shrewfield's alleged transformation capability. He had the following to say: Ah, my mistake... instead of just the line from an ambiguous line from a nameless background character this pet theory also has some degree of support from the least reliable character in the entire series... the narrator... whose dialogue is frequently at odds with what is actually being shown on screen. Considering what we know of the writing process which produced these scripts, I suppose it's no surprise that such errors would be made and reiterated when multiple episodes are being worked on at once and nobody's comparing notes with each other. In the interest of completeness, we would do well to note that nobody in the original Southern Cross dialogue ever refers to the Shrewfield as transformable, directly or indirectly. The key points of circumstantial evidence he cites are: Let's start with the obvious... the similarities between the Shrewfield's ventral gun mount and the head turret of a VF-1 are superficial at best. Unlike the Valkyrie and Legioss, which both have head turrets that couldn't possibly be mistaken for just a protrusion from the ventral airframe, there is nothing to suggest that the Shrewfield's gun mount is anything other than a gun bolted to the underside of a fixed fuselage. By this logic, any aircraft with visible panel seams is a robot in disguise... apart from the panel seams which do not line up in any meaningful way with elements which could potentially facilitate transformation (and in fact differ between the Shrewfield's few appearances), the airframe design itself seems designed to confound a transformation, with a lack of any obvious structures which could become the arms or feet, and fixed wings as wide as the aircraft is long (which are connected directly to the side of the engines)... it should come as no surprise that there is no evidence whatsoever that Southern Cross's creators ever intended the Shrewfield to transform in the first place... so the counterarguments that "it looks like it can" and "they might've been planning to have it transform but we'll never know because the show was cut short" don't hold water. Considering that transformable mecha were the exception rather than the rule in the Southern Cross series, the most likely explanation is that the aircraft was simply never intended to transform, given the total lack of evidence to the contrary. Okay... are you shitting me? I did a triple-take before I actually believed he was serious about this one. Aside from the fact that the unused VTOL design from Robotech II: the Sentinels bears only a superficial resemblance to the Shrewfield (note the under-wing engines with obvious foot structure, etc.), citing an unused, non-canon design from an aborted TV series as evidence that a vaguely similar-looking background mecha from a canon saga of the original series is transformable is about as inane as it gets. Considering the tone of this paragraph, it seems like he does care what those of us who don't like Southern Cross think and say about the series... despite claims to the contrary. Of course, since there were only ever a handful of fans who actually liked the Masters Saga, and most of them have pretty much abandoned the fandom altogether, I really do not doubt that the majority don't care what we say... as they're never around to read it.

I can't speak for the content of the novels on that particular note as it's been a dog's age since I bothered to read any of them, but in the planned Robotech II: the Sentinels series and the current "Yune-ified" Robotech continuity, the United Earth Gov't (or whatever was left of it after the Zentradi were done with it) did have a space colonization program which was at least tangentially related to the Expeditionary Force's Pioneer mission. Whether the colony program actually had any measure of success remains unknown, something which is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. Thus far, nobody's mentioned any colonies outside our solar system, and it's doubtful the SDF-3 established any colonies while they were busy being shot at on virtually every planet they visited (at least in the comics). Given that in Prelude they REF has converted a bunch of old colony ships into weapons of mass destruction (the neutron-s missiles, to be precise), I'd guess their colonization program was either suspended or didn't pan out after yet another apocalyptic war rolled in to thin the population out. The new generation of colony ships, the Ark Angel-class, seem to have had even worse luck, as Vince Grant absconded with the only spaceworthy one (the Ark Angel) and her half-complete sister ships were destroyed in drydock when Captain Grant destroyed Space Station Liberty with a neutron-s missile.

None that I'm aware of... when it comes to the Robotech universe, your mileage may vary in the most literal fashion imaginable. Exactly how big the universe is depends on a number of things, like how you interpret the various conflicting remarks about the location of Optera and Tirol in the TV series, and whether or not you consider the "expanded universe" stuff accurate or not. Whether many of these exotic locales are even in our galaxy or not is unclear at best. The one thing that has remained generally consistent through all the various depictions is that the world occupied by the Invid prior to their invasion of Earth was in another galaxy. Tirol and the other Sentinels worlds are placed alternately in the Milky Way and in another unspecified galaxy, and can vary between episodes and depictions. Generally, the only thing which is established when it comes to alien worlds is that they're very far away from Earth... which is not particularly helpful.

Nah, I doubt Brooklyn Red Leg would be so arrogant as to claim overall responsibility for the various unsupportable assertions that the Shrewfield is a transformable fighter... some of the blame must be laid at the doorsteps of Rhade and the handful of other overly vocal sadists who actually enjoyed the Masters Saga. Like so many other debates of unclear or inconsistent elements of Robotech, the argument that the Shrewfield is transformable relies almost exclusively on taking what little evidence exists out of context and imagining connections where none exists. Essentially, the resulting argument consists entirely of assertions which use other, questionable assertions as their basis, resulting in a chain of "logic" that would only appear sound to someone who believed the initial argument was true in the first place.

Odd... Brooklyn Red Leg/1st Border Red Devil always struck me as one of the more levelheaded Robotech fans, as well as a fairly knowledgeable person about Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross. I wonder what he did to lose his posting privileges here... Nitpick train comin' in to the station... that fighter's real name is the "Shrewfield", or at least that's what the Southern Cross artbooks call it. Its two Robotech names, "Specter" and "Sylphid(e)" were both pulled out of thin air, the former by Palladium's writers, and the latter by Peter Walker and company. Like pretty much everything in Southern Cross, the artbooks offer only a name and a picture, and decline to offer any actual information. The business about Robotech's version of the Shrewfield being transformable is based entirely on a single line of dialogue and rather substantial amounts of conjecture... the favorite being that the ventral gun mount looks vaguely like a backwards VF-1 head. You weren't the only one this time... I made the initial assumption that Admiral DMC McKeever and Kevin McKeever were one and the same... who knew Robotech could have two such outspoken suckups with the same name? Wrong Sylphide... Nice tho, FlamingGuantlet did a three-mode transforming FFR-31MR/D Super Sylph, and a FRX-00 Mave too. That'd be from Yukikaze, actually... the Sylphide referred to above is the name Peter Walker and co. came up with for the Shrewfield non-transformable fighter from Southern Cross, which was referred to as the Specter in the old Palladium RPG.

Honestly, considering the sheer quantity of reused material and Harmony Gold's subsequent failure to continue the story, I'm rather inclined to write Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles off as yet another false start, despite the fact that the movie did actually get released. It really does speak volumes about the quality of Harmony Gold's work when their only means of maintaining the fanbase's interest in continuing the "Shadow Saga" is to keep the fate of Rick Hunter, the only character the fans still care about, up in the air indefinitely with a sequence of cliffhanger endings. They did it in Prelude, leaving his fate uncertain after the SDF-3 was caught too close to a neutron-s missile detonation, and again in Shadow Chronicles with the SDF-3 stuck in orbit of a black hole and under attack by Haydonites. Eventually they'll run out of mortal peril for the guy to be in and they'll have no choice but to string fans along with whether or not he'll make it to the toilet in time.

Yeah, Rem is just one member of the modest legion of Zor clones who seem to come out of the woodwork whenever the story needs a technological deus ex machina or just someone with a logorrhea-like compulsion to recite vast quantities of inane technobabble to cover for weak writing or a plot hole/twist the writers couldn't figure out a way to fix. Amusingly, it isn't a cop-out limited to Luceno, Daley, and the Waltrips anymore. The leaked draft of the "Shadow Saga" plot synopsis includes yet another Zor clone, whose grand plan to save his homeworld from the Haydonite menace is to... wait for it... build a really big cannon! Clearly, this is the work of the razor-sharp intellect of robotechnology's creator, a man whose all-too-frequent tendency to take drastic action without thinking things through seems to be the root of all the universe's evils.

Edit: I know this's gonna sound rather frustrated, but I think after the most recent batch of sheets I have good cause to be. Oh you're entirely correct... Macross II isn't getting the shaft the way some people thought it would. In fact, it's been getting the shaft in a way most of us simply didn't expect. Yes, it's gotten a fair bit of coverage, more than any of us really expected it would, but the content of that coverage is virtually worthless... a mixture of internally inconsistent and blatantly incorrect information which varies in obnoxiousness from merely annoying to genuinely facepalm-worthy. If they're getting readily-available information wrong on a consistent basis, what's the bloody point? Just for example, the recent Macross II Zentran mecha sheet's size comparison is completely incorrect, making the mecha substantially larger than the plethora of available sources (one of which is an official size comparison published in Macross II's This is Animation book and reprinted in several other publications) indicate they are. We're not talking splitting hairs over a foot or two, we're talking some of the mecha being represented at as much as 1.5x the size their original designers intended. Somewhat more excusable is their goof with the Giant Monster, inadvertently referring to it as the "Monster II" instead... though where they got the sizes for that is anybody's guess...