SebastianP

An Uraga! Yay! Now I just need to figure out how to get the thing to a format I can use...

I ended up sounding a bit harsh in my previous post now that I read it over, which wasn't my intention. I'm just trying to point out where stuff needs more work. That the work of piecing everything together is pretty much insanity inducing was something I already knew a bit about... I know about the extracted archives from Macross 30, the problem is the upload site used appears to require an account to use and a stand-alone app as well, which doesn't want to work for me. I am kind of wondering right now how well the armored parts from Mac30 would fit on the Uta Macross VF-25, once they're correctly scaled. I'll have to experiment with that at some point. Do none of the extracted games contain an Uraga-class? It's the one major NUNS combatant that I've never been able to get a model of and it's been a pretty major presence in all of the last three TV shows and their movies...

The VF-25 Tornado and Super Parts are kind of incomplete, they're missing their leg armor; and while the Armored Parts *are* complete, the jet itself is not in the correct configuration to mount them (all of the super/tornado/armored versions need to drop the leg some amount at the "gerwalk" joint and then go the same amount up at the knee). The models are also for some reason not in scale, they're almost 200% scale compared to the specs (think 1/72 scale compared to a 1/144). This is the easiest part to fix though. Thanks a bunch for posting them anyway though, because I did *not* have an Armored VF-25 of any shape before, so this helps a lot.

The RX-78, of which at least 5 examples were made according to the lore (though only one was in the anime); and the RX-178 of which at least three were made that *are* in the anime? *those* unique, OP machines, that could be bested by mass production units in one on one if the opponent was skilled enough? The "actually super" prototypes came with the Zeta itself and the Double Zeta, and later the Nu. But the RX-78 and RX-178 weren't outright super robots masquerading as real robots like the Psycommu units were, which are what I associate with super prototypes. If Basara had been loaded up with live ammo instead of speaker pods, he'd have wrecked at least a couple of waves worth of Varauta single handedly... And no one in the whole setting so much as touched his VF for a good long while, and they tried *very hard*, because he was making such a nuisance of himself. That was part skill, and part superior specs. Though I will admit Basara is the kind of person who'd be challenged to no-damage pacifist run the complete Touhou series with a Guitar Hero controller, only hear the word "guitar", and then do it. In one go. Without having heard of the game before. It's a nerf in the sense that there are maneuvers that the VF-19 and VF-22 cannot do, that the YF-19 and YF-21 could, due to feature removal, or added safety restrictions. Isamu in a stock VF-19A vs Isamu in the Alpha One would be in the Alpha One's favor, because production plane wouldn't let Isamu pull some of the stuff he did with the prototype. Yes, it wouldn't have been any good like that as a mass production unit, but that's.... basically how the first couple of Gundams worked too. Awesome but impractical for general issue. Which is similar to how switching to cheaper materials and stripping out some features made the Prototype RX-78 Gundam possible to mass produce in the form of the RGM-79 GM, And again; Guld could not have defeated the X-9 Ghost in a VF-22. He could defeat the X-9 in the YF-21 because it allowed him to control his VF past the point where his body was turning into mush. I will admit that this is not generally considered a thing you should be doing, but given the circumstances, he only won because of it and no other machine of its day or five years into the future would have let him do it. So. Nerfed. Watered-down. Feature-incomplete. The VF-19 and VF-22 were better general purpose machines. The YF-19 and YF-21 were super prototypes that could do things the production ones could not. The margin is not *as* large as the margin between the Gundam and the GM, but it's there.

I forgot to mention the actual ending for the non-original characters, plus a few more things. Blame it being like 4 in the morning when I hit post last time.

Depends on what level of super prototype shenanigans you're ascribing to Gundam... i.e. which part of the series you're looking at. If we're looking at the early Gundams (MSG and MSG-Z) they weren't hugely faster or more powerful than the grunt suits, and being in a Gundam was definitely not an "I Win" button for any of the early pilots. Not like, say, the Fire Valkyrie. Also, the VF-19 was nerfed by having the flight controls tuned down so normal pilots could fly - this doesn't translate to reduced engine power or anything that would show up in the usual stat block we get for model kits and the like, but it's still a performance hit. And the VF-22 had a bunch of stuff removed compared to the YF-21; that's technically another nerf, as no one could fly the VF-22 like Guld flew the YF-21.

Keep in mind that Master File is not official canon, though. Elements of them *have* apparently been re-used in the official setting material, though whether that's because Ukyo Kodachi read the books and was inspired, or came up with it themselves independently I couldn't possibly tell; but nothing in the books is canon unless it's corroborated in an anime or in the Chronicle... which hasn't been updated in ages. So, what we do have for official sources on the YF-29 is the Macross 30 game - which is definitely canon, as you said yourself; and possibly official licensed toys and model kits, and their descriptions. Macross 30, which was the original source for there even being an YF-29B, only has a single example - Rod Baltmer's YF-29B Perceval. The other *five* examples of the YF-29 in the game (Alto Saotome's, Ozma Lee's, Leon Sakaki's, Isamu Dyson's, and the 30th anniversary Itasha version) are all straight up labeled "YF-29 Durandal". The DX toy versions of all of the above are also labeled similarly - only Rod's machine from the game is an YF-29B Perceval, all of the others are YF-29 Durandal's; and the DX toys add the Roy Focker Custom and most recently the Max Jenius custom as YF-29 Durandals. The Bandai 1/100 model kits also refer to Max' ride as a YF-29 Durandal, and does not claim any downgrades over Alto's machine in the (conveniently officially translated) blurb on the model kit manual, which can be read for both models on Dalong.net. The model kit description for Max' machine even lists the "ultra high purity fold quarts amplifiers". The implication is that while extremely expensive to produce and thus only made in extremely limited quantities, the colonies can reproduce the YF-29 to the same spec as the first unit; though only a handful of special ace custom units are around. Aisha on Ouroboros may be able to produce them locally due to the natural resources available, but that's basically artisanal crafting, not mass production. The YF-29B is obviously the NUNS attempt at replicating the YF-29; it has a different name because it's not built by the same people. It may or may not have been discontinued after that one prototype due to the expense; this is not mentioned anywhere in the bio for the unit AFAICT. I don't remember what white text on Macross Mecha Manual indicates (green is for conjecture or calculated data, purple for Macross Chronicle info; and teal is for Master File stuff); so I don't know where exactly the "Philosopher's stone" stuff comes from given that the article isn't sourced. Is that novel info or from a toy manual? The gundam-type things infiltrated the franchise all the way back in Macross Plus/Macross 7; with the YF-19 being so good that the production version had to be nerfed; and Fire Bomber flying around in custom suits that outperformed the line machines.

There was a novelization, and someone did translate the whole thing. I'm not sure I'm allowed to tell you where I found it on account of piracy rules, though. Don't expect anything that wasn't an anime original to ever get the anime treatment in the Macross universe - Kawamori just doesn't work that way. All the stories are changed to suit whatever medium he's working with, which is why for example the Frontier TV series and Frontier Movies are mutually exclusive plot-wise. As for a plot summary:

Minivalks, linked above, has both the Megalord, Megaroad, and all known versions of VF-4, but only as untransformable, 3D-printable models. The ship models are *really* resource intensive, the Megaroad in particular has massive amounts of modeled in surface detail, They should at the very least be possible to trace over to make easier to use models for your game project.

Yeah, this is the Windermere ship, the Dulfim is much less rounded. Wonder if it's named Dulfim in the files, though, because it just might? It's based on the same general concept... Anyway, thanks a bunch for posting these, @reaper7092

A 3D model is "whatever scale you decide it is" when you have a 3D program that can be set to work in meters. I made the 3D model 1:1 scale according to the official chronicle size. And the video game model is quite possibly the same overall mesh as was used for the TV show, it certainly has the same texture, maybe at a lower resolution. Even the smudge pattern is the same. It's not like the shape is super complex or it was fetured as a "hero unit" at any point, so it never needed to be super high detail in the first place. The fanmade doujinshi only really needed to draw a triangle the size of the Northampton's forward hull, and a triangle the size of a folded up VF-11, and attempt to fit as many VF-11 triangles into the size of the Northampton triangle as possible. Which is what they did, except with silhouettes of the fighters. The liberties taken by FANKY involve *making the ship bigger and fold the fighters up tighter in order to make things fit*. They didn't shrink the ship any, or make the fighters bigger. And it's not like "bad official figures" is a new thing - Star Wars had the infamous Executor controversy, where the books were saying Vader's flagship was five times the length of its escorts and all the visual evidence in the movie said it was more like 11 or 12 times, and the fans got vocal enough that Lucasfilm actually changed their mind (and amusingly claimed the older figure was "Imperial disinformation" that had been reprinted without checking). Stargate SG-1 had its liner notes, where the fighters were 30 meters and the carriers were 195 and 225 meters, which meant the fighters wouldn't fit in the hangars (they were literally too wide); the VFX crew eventually leaked the models, which had been made 516 and 650 meters long in 1:1 scale which could be verified by the size of the bridge chairs; while the fighters were only 14 meters and could be comfortably parked three wide in the hangar just like they did in the interior shots in the show. Several points here. First of all - if the ship masses a mere 1,200 tons, it launched a third of its mass in fighters during Operation stargazer, as 28 nine-ton VF-11s, 4 twelve-ton VF-17s, and 4 eight-and-a-half ton VF-19s add up to 336 tons total, *without* super packs, fuel, or ammunition. Oh, and Max' VF-22S, that's another nine to nine and a half tons. This is easily in the 400 ton range just by allowing one ton each for super packs for the 32 fighters that had those, plus another ton in fuel for all fighters. That's absurd. Second - the Hindenburg was 245 meters and massed 200 tons. The Northampton would be having a density close to that of a Zeppelin. Third - you can tell what a decent mass for the ship would be by scaling the 7.77 million ton, 1510 meter Battle 7 down to 1/6 scale, which drops its mass to 36,000 tons at just over 250 meters. (While it would have 1/6th of the bulkheads and decks inside, those decks and bulkheads would be 6 times as thick relatively, so it's basically a wash). A Northampton is less blocky and less robust than a Battle class, so I'll allow it to be a third of that mass, so 12,000 tons. Mass controversy solved by means of shifting a decimal point. (same goes for the Guantanamo, which is the size of an aircraft carrier and should mass like an aircraft carrier, i.e. 90,000 tons rather than 9,000.) Basically, I'm more willing to believe that the numbers are wrong when they contradict everything else I can see, than I am willing to believe convoluted explanations for why the numbers are accurate. Occam's razor and whatnot. In this case, at 250 meters I'm more than willing to believe that someone forgot a zero in the mass of the ship; but if the 250 is wrong like I believe, then the 1200 tons even more wrong. Yet the length of the Northampton-class was revised from 250 to 252.5 meters. Databook authors don't care - you saw that with the Delta stuff. I'm the kind of person who'll go by the VFX over the databook when the databook figures don't work. (Hmm. At some point I should actually check how big the DYRL macross model becomes if I scale it by the conning tower. That might actually make some sense of the city interior.)

Thanks! Problem is it's another piece of evidence that the official length of the ship is bunk, tho... Here are the points I've found so far regarding that: 1 - the official line art of the bridge shows that it has three vertically stacked decks, with a sensor cluster underneath, all under the main windscreen. The middle deck is wide enough for three bridge operators abreast (though there's just a box in the the middle), which means the bridge has to be at least three meters wide. more likely four given that there are consoles to either side of the chair. The spacing of the seats and consoles of the back row of the second deck indicates that there's something like two meters in between the chairs, so I'll go with four meters. If each deck is three meters tall, which seems to be the minimum given how much headroom there looks to be, then the whole windscreen would need to be twelve meters. On the game 3D model, when the ship is scaled to 250 meters, that window is 2 meters wide at its absolute widest, by 6 meters tall. Ergo, in order to make the bridge fit, the ship needs to be 500 meters. (scaling up the bridge on the outside until the interior fits would make it look Super-Deformed...) 2 - the FANKY doujin did a "how do we stack the VF-11s to fit all 37 we see launch from the Stargazer" - the answer was, "gut the entire ship and leave no room for anything except the hangar". And they still had to use a "fat" version of the hull to do it. 3 - the Gefion's hangar pods in Macross 30 aren't tall enough for most of the fighters to fit through, and especially not the Koenig Monster. Some of the fighters have trouble fitting on the width of the flight deck, even. (Gefion appears to be rendered at the official 250 meter size...) 4 - there's somehow a sixty to eighty meter hatch on the aft belly of the Northampton-class (the VF-14 is just short of 20 meters, and the hatch is more than three times the length of the fighter and we don't see the forward edge of it) where the longest unbroken edge I can find at 250 meter scale is less than 20 meters unless on the actual bustle itself where the engines are. 5 - the fighters for Operation Stargazers were said to be fired out the missile launchers on the Stargazer... missile launchers which are less than 2 m in diameter on the model. (The 2059 model of the ship is actually remarkably proportional to the 2030 model, and there are a lot of features in common to the point where I've been able to almost entirely backdate it with only a few details left to do...) And finally, 6 - if the ship is 1,200 tons at 250 meters, it's basically made of styrofoam. It's literally the length of a Kirov-class cruiser by its official stats, much more voluminous due to its shape, and weighs 1/20th of what the Kirov does with full magazines and empty tanks. Whoever wrote the chronicle writeup went through all the papers and only looked for numbers and never analyzed the art, at all, and now we're stuck with numbers that make no sense.

So, I've been playing around a bit with the Northampton 3D model that someone extracted from the PS3 games some more, and a question kind of strikes me: How do people get on or off this ship without it being docked to either a bigger ship or a space station? (the docking tube arrangement is in the Mac7 lineart on MMM). It can't land (though we see ships hover indefinitely just fine, so not a huge deal); and the standard version most definitely does not have the room for a flight deck. And the "beam me up zone" under the Gefion in Macross 30 is game mechanics, plain and simple. In other words, the ship basically has to have a shuttlecraft somewhere, maybe two given how it's symmetrical. So where are they and how do they dock? Are they in the cavity in the back inboard of the weapons pods? Would there be a hidden hatch on the underside next to the Yamato-esque third bridge? Actually, do we even have any pictures of shuttles other than Sheryl's private transport, the König Monster and the Delta shuttle? Because none of those would even fit physically through anything that looks like an opening on the Northampton *or* the Stealth Cruiser....

You're missing something critical here. I don't expect the show air until 2025, with a teaser in December next year, for one important reason; We haven't heard a thing about auditions, yet. Frontier wasn't announced at all - we first heard about it when someone described auditions going on at Victor Entertainment for a "new big-budget anime" and someone said the pamphlets given to the hopefuls mentioned Macross. That was in February 2007. In April, auditions had concluded and Megumi Nakajima was presented as the winner at the 25th anniversary concert. There was the Deculture Edition episode 1 in December, and then the show aired properly starting in April 2008. Delta was given an "A new Macross TV show is in development" announcement in March 2014, and then we next heard about it in October 2014 when they announced that auditions would begin in December that year. Auditions ran until April 2015, and then there was silence until October, when Kawamori revealed more info; and then we got the first episode preview in December 2015, followed by the show proper in April 2016. We are at "A new Macross TV show is in development", and I haven't heard anything about auditions, which means we're at least one year out from today. More likely, we'll get an audition announcement somewhere this fall, and they'll be done by April next year, with the show airing in April 2025. (Unless I've been totally oblivious and there *has* been auditions that I missed hearing about. But IIRC all we know about Macross 40+ is that it's being animated by Sunrise.) Edit: The original thread discussing the existence of auditions for a new Macross show back in 2007 is absolute megacringe. The things people apparently wanted from the new show... thank the Hoary Froating Head we didn't get any of that.

Not really. I *like* that Macross has the balls to say "their story is done, let's look at someone else's story" and *doesn't* fall for the urge to go back and fill in the blanks (except for Zero, which was pretty, but weak, IMO. So many little things that make me go "but how?!?" on a rewatch with that.) It's nice to see some characters again *occasionally*, but Macross is much, much better at any other Space Opera I can name that it's a *vast* galaxy, too large to comfortably travel across. Once you start to deliberately follow one particular cast member around after the end of their initial story, it becomes about *them* instead of about the setting you've built. See Star Wars, which was "The adventures of Luke Skywalker and Friends" so hard that if you look at the official Legends chronology, there's only like one year total out of *thirty* starting with A New Hope when Luke is actually not out and about doing something. (one of the last novels written in the Legends continuity filled in the other gap in that thirty year stretch, so chances are that one year of vacation would have gone as well eventually). Disney pulling the plug on the Expanded Universe has only fixed the issue in that there's a lot of empty places to put new adventures in now, because every damned official media is still involving the Skywalkers or adjacent characters somehow. (Rebels had guest appearances from Leia and Vader. The Mandalorian guest starred Ashoka and Luke. Boba Fett wasn't a *friend* of Luke's per se, but he was an original trilogy character. Kenobi is Kenobi, and his show included Vader and Leia as well. I haven't actually seen Andor, but it's been touted as the best piece of Star Wars media since Disney took over, and that might be because of a lack of Skywalkers?) Meanwhile, Macross can and does have the balls to go "yeah, have a story about characters who've never met and are never going to meet anyone from any previous show, at least not on camera", like Macross Plus or Macross Frontier, *and* it has the balls to go "this is a dramatization, and may not be 100% historically accurate" so that people won't get hung up too hard on canon. Heck, given how the shows seems to actually alternate a bit? We got Plus, which had no prior characters involved; Seven, which had the Jenius clan; Zero, which had Roy; Frontier, which had no prior characters except for a *connection* to Zero; and Delta, which involved the Jenius clan again, I'm going to speculate and say "the next show might involve relatives of someone *else* in the original series bridge crew". Maybe a member of the Milliome family? (Shammy settled on Luna after Space War 1 and had eleven kids by 2045... and while her hubby was a rich heir type, Shammy was bridge crew on the ship that saved humanity, so maybe some of them took her name?)