SebastianP

Err...what? Really really confused by this, because... that doesn't make much sense. B and V are the second most infamous "Japanese does not make a distinction" pair of consonant sounds after R and L - and one of the first anime I ever watched in Japanese was Slayers, where Megumi Hayashibara's voice going "REBITEI-SHUN" and "DORAGON SUREIBU" are some of my stand-out memories. Especially since I just rewatched the the first episode the other day. When you said they have different kana, I tried to look them up, and not a single kana table - even the big ones, that cover Hiragana, Katakana, Dakuon, Handakuon and Yoon - have a "vu" sound listed. So I'm really most sincerly confused. What kana are they using in that name? Edit: OK, I googled the kana itself from your post, and found a wiktionary page. It's a real kana, used exclusively for transliteration, and it's noted to be a relatively recent addition, which is likely why it's not in my scanned-from-schoolbooks tables. But... as mentioned, Japanese itself does not make a distinction, and we have plenty of examples of Japanese natives, even working professionally, being *really careless* with B/V and R/L because it doesn't come naturally. If you're really sure it's specfically meant to be a V sound, then Evna from Oz sounds like the best fit.

I'd suggest possibly expanding your search to less literal transcriptions, maybe? I'm pretty sure you can plausibly read those katakana as "Ebner". for example, which is a German surname. Not finding anyone immediately relevant with that name in particular though.

It's not really the cost of the material itself that's giving me pause, it's the shipping. Excuse the rant: There's an ancient treaty from back when China was still an Empire, under which China, as a developing country, is exempt from having to charge their own customers for the entire delivery to overseas customers, because the wealthy paternalistic developed nations would shoulder the costs so the (then) poor Chinese public wouldn't have to. This translated into Chinese companies being able to send absolutely colossal amounts of online shopping towards Europe, with free shipping - company wasn't being charged for it by the Chinese post office, so they weren't charging their customers for it, and when all this mail got to Europe, the European mail services had to pick up the entire tab for sorting and delivery. They were understandably upset with this because of the sheer amount of online shopping, so they tried various methods to put brakes on it, after the deluge started in earnest during the pandemic. *My* country decided that the best method would be to apply a 7 euro (ish, we don't use Euros) flat per parcel fee, to be collected by the Customs service on behalf of the post office, for *any* out-of-EU shipping. And since the Customs Service were the ones collecting the fee, they'd *also* automatically process it for import duties and sales tax while they were at it. This makes Chinese internet shopping about as expensive as within-EU mail order shopping. But Japan Post already charges through the *nose* for shipping, because they lost their "developing nation" status under the postal treaty before WW2 I think. And the way the import duties and sales tax are levied, they're on the entire amount paid at the point of sale - so if I've paid 18 euro for a thing, they'll charge me 25 euro to ship it from Japan, 7 euro to handle the package, 20% of the 50 euro in import duties because I'm at 50 Euro or above, and then 25% in sales tax on the 60 euro up to that point, for a total of 75 euro for an item that - before this whole crapshoot started - would have been 18 euro for the item, 12 euro for the shipping, no processing fee, no import fee, and even odds on not being processed for sales tax, meaning on average 33-ish euro. (Actually, before the pandemic, some of those items could be bought straight off of Amazon with Prime Free Shipping for the Japanese prices if you were lucky). Same thing applies to packages from the US - insane shipping, and then I get our insane import duties and sales tax when it shows up.

That tracks with what I was remembering. I wish I could get my hands on those novels, but local amazon doesn't list them, and US amazon won't ship those books to my country. And anywhere else, I'm going to get hit with Japanpost's postage, plus a 7 euro handling fee, plus 20% import duties, and 25% sales tax on the entire amount including the postage. I don't shop from Japan anymore after I ended up paying 60 euros in shipping, handling and taxes on a 15 euro gunpla. Oh, cool - I missed those. I did remember the Ravens paint job for the VF-19, at least...

No offense taken. I was an even more ignorant beginner at the time than I am now. But much better modelers than me have tried and they end up with similar results - either a fatter spaceship or a too skinny robot. Also - it is mark of Kawamori's skill that his designs require so little anime magic to actually work. The man is an actual wizard, creating so many designs that can actually be turned into toys and perfectly transform without any magic. I'm having a big empty head moment here, because as far as I remember, none of the anime actually *does* directly reference the events of the VF-X2 game in any obvious way. I haven't had time to check all of Frontier because there's so many different political discussions spread out across the show, but I don't remember Vindirance or Lactence, or the 2050 coup attempt, being brought up at all, anywhere in any anime. If you know that it happened, you can see its *effects* everywhere, but if you didn't know about it you'd just gloss over it entirely so it feels almost like sneaky fanservice. (I did verify the one instance in Delta where it was likely to have come up in discussion, which was Berger's exposition in episode 19, but he goes from Macross 7 to Macross Frontier and entirely skips the 2050 coup attempt). And the only things I remember relating to VF-X2 in Macross 30 is that there were skins for the Ravens in there, for the VF-11 and VF-19 if I recall correctly. There may have been something in the descriptions for those skins, but I never bothered pulling up my camera to read those.

OK, so this whole post you're mostly making Watsonian, in-universe, arguments for why things were changed. I have been and will be making Doylist, out-of-universe ones. Both can be true at the same time. To start off - I did point out that Gigasion *is* referencing Battle 7 directly. It's just the *original palette* version of Battle 7 from episodes 1 through 15, where the ship was still just a big ship. I can think of several Doylist reasons to do this. One is that the 3D-era ships across the board have been trying look more realistic, and the bright Gundam colors aren't especially realistic on a warship, especially when every other warship seen across two TV shows and four movies have been more subdued in color. Also, for a good long while, we had both Hollywood and video games going "the less saturated it is the more realistic it is", and this era overlaps with Frontier and Delta. One is that there is a concept called scale effect - a visual psychology trick that makes the brain more accepting of something being much larger based on the palette. Basically, the human brain doesn't want to accept that something that big can be that saturated in color, so you mix some white or gray into the color it's actually supposed to be to trick the brain. I learned of the concept from plastic modelling forums, where all the really advanced modelers swear by it, and I think because digital VFX evolved from physical VFX, the same trick may be taught in formal schooling for that, but I don't have any so I can't say for certain. One is that a bright white giant robot would overshadow any scene it's in in the movie, even if it's far in the background. As animated, Gigasion is obviously bright enough to be the main character of the scenes where it's supposed to be, but with the even brighter colors from Macross 7, it would be hard to focus on the VFs because of the great big flashbang of white in the background. (I think this is the same reason why the Battle 7 was gray for the first 15 episodes - a lot of the time, we were mostly seeing Diamond Force launching from it, and if the ship had been white it would have been overpowering. I will have to look at later episodes of Macross 7 to see if they actually updated the launching scenes with the brighter palette later). Also, in 3D it's much more difficult to change the palette between shots without people noticing, so pulling the trick of "gray up close, white from afar" is not as viable as it was in the cel animation days. As for the VFs - I can easily justify in a Doylist manner why very brightly colored Variable Fighters are still perfectly realistic, by pointing out that real life fighter aircraft since Manfred von Richthofen's Fokker Dreidecker, all the way to the JSDF's Itasha F-15s, have indeed been painted in basically every color imaginable, and even to this day, the US Navy's "Wing King" fighters fly combat missions painted up in high visibility throwback schemes when the carrier's command staff allows them. (VFs also aren't big enough to be affected by the Scale Effect, not by comparison, but they're also so large that they're going to be mostly out of frame or self-shadowing in any scene where you have a *character* needing the focus, so they also won't be as big of a visual flashbang as a bright white ship against a black background is). I can buy this for Macross 7, because unless the animators were super fans who owned the original show on physical media, or the physical media was provided to them by the production company for research, it would be really quite difficult in 1994 to find the original show to research. Not that it was even relevant because about the only thing reused from previous productions on a regular basis was Exsedol's character design. Basically no point to go back and rewatch the old show to see how things were supposed to work if you're not using anything from it. For Macross Frontier, the situation is different. Aside from physical media being more available, by this point not only did you have digital distribution, but you could find whole episodes on Youtube, and I'm fairly certain there was a decent selection of clips on Nico-Nico as well. Could, did, or should the animators have done any research on Macross 7 this way? I have no idea. But it was a vastly simpler proposition to do so than when Macross 7 was made. Also, in the 3D era, instead of "stock footage" where they just toss a ready made clip that was hand drawn with all sorts of wonky proportions every couple of minutes, what happens is that you use a scene script and then re-render it with relevant changes. This scene script will have the relative scales of all the models used available (just click on a fighter or ship to see what scale it is), and if the modelers are smart, everything will be in "true" scale all along so you don't have to worry about it. These scene files were kept around for a long, long time, because some of the ones from Frontier are re-used in Delta, with changes making it obvious that they're not just composited but actually re-rendered. As for 2D animation errors, I don't really bother thinking about most of them. It's only when they're so big that there's something in my brain that goes "that can't be right", like shooting fighters out of the torpedo tubes of a 250 meter ship... To me, animation errors are wonky proportions or visual glitches that I can gloss over as unimportant. That one had an entire episode based around it... (but we were done with this particular conversation a week ago). OK. Here's the thing - I tried to do this, a long time ago. I tried to build a Macross 7 based on the animation reference drawings. It didn't go well, because there's a lot of parts that the drawings we have available do not cover (there's probably more drawings available to the actual animators though); but also because, as drawings, they turned out not to be completely proportional to each other. Notably, the ship form of Battle 7 is thinner than the robot form. Build the robot like the ship, and you get very skinny legs and arms. Build the ship like the robot, and you get something with proportions much more like Battle Frontier. This is why I was saying that I'm thinking they tried, and gave it up as impossible and started over, using only the transformation skeleton. Note that even then, the Battle Frontier doesn't actually have a perfect transformation - the gun is too long, and even with the stock collapsed, it clips into the pelvis while in ship form. This may be one of the reasons why they've never made a ship-form Battle class model kit - it's fairly obvious if you flip it upside down that there's clipping going on. (This goes for the game model used in the Frontier games, but it's very obvious that the game studio had access to the shooting models because as mentioned, they repeat some of the weirder animator's choices verbatim, like the ship name "Maiduru" being hard-painted into the texture for the Guantanamo model) (This is not a complaint or a demand that anyone fix the problem, just an observation that the model is not perfect). This is an argument that makes a lot of sense from the Watsonian perspective, and from the perspective of a superfan who owns or at least has access to all the reference books. Remember that the Macross Chronicle did not exist at this time, so information relating to VF-X2 was *legally* available only to people who had the game and the reference book for it. Here in the West, information relevant to Macross 13 and VF-X2 was circulated by fans who bought the game and book, then translated the information, and shared it online. Because many of us western fans had no access to *any* of the books, we went to the fan-created indexes like M3 or Sketchley's, and absorbed this information along with everything else. But... did it work the same way in Japan? I'm thinking that it is way more common for the "average" western Macross fan to have found out about Macross 13, because there basically aren't any "casual" Macross fans due to what a PITA it is to get the anime; than it is for an average Japanese Macross fan, ca 2008, to know much about it. Honest question, by the way. I know there were obviously hardcore Macross fans in Japan that were at least as well informed as us (probably more, given that they can read the books without help), but there's something that gets me thinking that VF-X2 was paradoxically more obscure in Japan. My Doylist reasoning, to re-iterate, is that even if you wanted to make an accurate transforming 3D model of the Battle 7 you wouldn't be able to without just as much pixie dust as in Macross 7, and in textured 3D due to having textures on all the parts, the pixie dust would be more obvious. And the Battle Frontier looks a lot more like someone *tried* to do a Battle 7 first, than someone who started making a design evolved from Battle 7 through Battle 13. (Also, did we ever get a Watsonian explanation for the very obvious model reuse where Astrea is literally Galaxy with added parts? Someone explained that in one of the Another Century's Episode games, they basically flat out went "yeah, it's actually the same ship", but that's not Macross canon. The Doylist reason is obviously "crap, we forgot to make new textures!")

I honestly didn't think I'd need to prove my *color selection*, given that this is the palette used on the Gigasion (which is basically a stand-in for Battle 7 given who's captaining it) so I didn't think to put in a comparison screenshot from the anime until you complained. I wasn't planning on a gotcha. (honestly the full saturation/brightness color scheme looks weird and cartoony on big ships in 3D when put next to the more muted "realistic" colors of the ships in Frontier/Delta, so to me it was just obvious to use the more muted colors.) But I guess what I was supposed to read out of that is that other than the color scheme, you think they would go for making the Battle 7 the same design as Battle Frontier? As mentioned, the more vibrant colors from SDF-1 TV and Battle 7 look *strange* next to the more faded, muted ships of Frontier, Delta, and even DYRL. They're almost eye-searingly bright in a lineup. Which is why I think they went with the colors they did for Gigasion, to be honest. There's something about the shading style used in the 3D macross shows that does not particularly work well with large white objects that aren't meant to be the instant focus of the scene (like Alto's VF-25 or Delta squadron's VF-31s). I've been thinking about making actual model edits to make the ship more like the Battle 7 - removing the shoulder turrets is easy. Building a new bridge foundation with room for the Diamond Force launchers instead of the turrets is more difficult, but not as bad as trying to make those fit on the model I have of the Battle 7 that's based on the overall lineart. (Also, if you want to talk "animation errors", holy heck the Battle 7 is probably the least consistently drawn ship in the setting. Never mind parts of it constantly changing colors, the proportions are different from basically every angle... Which is, I think, one of the reasons why the Battle 25 model is so different despite being based on the same concept. They couldn't *make* an accurate Battle 7 because the references don't match....)

Um.... In episode 1 of Macross 7, our first look at the exterior of Battle 7 looks like this: Notice that the ship is gray, with pale yellow cheek pads, There's two or three different angles of this area, from when Diamond Force is launching. All of them show this muted palette. So, when I was making a "realistic", more warship-like palette for Battle 7, I picked my colors right out of these scenes with a color picker tool. And then I noticed something strange as I was frame-by-framing my way through Zettai Live: the Gigasion had this exact color palette. Light gray, slightly desaturated reds and blues, and a quite pale yellow, even in the brightest lit scenes. So, kindly don't complain about the *colors*. What I was asking was, do you think they'd retcon the Battle 7 to be the same overall design as Battle Frontier? Or would they try to make an anime-accurate 3D model of the old ship instead? Edit: I'm noticing now that this shot is strange, because it implies the bridge block of the Battle 7 has been slid all the way back down the leg of the ship in order for the end of the angled flight deck to be in the foreground with the bridge block behind it. "An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilizations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop." — Iain M. Banks, Excession The Zentraedi were an Outside Context Problem for the Earths governments. It just so happened that Minmei turned out to be an Outside Context Problem for the Zentraedi.

I'm not sure I accept this as written. At the start of the project was very likely "let's develop alien-sized robots to fight the giant aliens", but you *also* have the Unification Wars going on at the same time, and it's kind of difficult to keep your development focus on equipment strictly to fight the *next* war while you're hip deep in an ongoing war already. It would rapidly have become "the enemy is developing giant robots, so we're developing giant robots to fight their giant robots!" among those not in the know about the aliens. Especially when the certainty that there will be a next war is kind of fading, because the aliens don't show for ten years. So it's not even that the Destroids were developed for the battlefield of "yesterday", they were for the battlefield of "today", only midnight came out of nowhere. Also note that the initial battle on South Ataria Island was exactly the kind of thing the destroids were supposed to fight - a ground invasion. The fold to Pluto and having to run the gauntlet to get back home was not in anyone's plans, the idea was to get to Lunar orbit and reinforce with more space units. Anyway, if the UN Spacy had convincing evidence of the actual playing field, I think so many bricks would have been shat that they could have constructed the whole grand cannon system out of them by 2005. Unification War? What Unification War? We have no time for wars, the ALIENS are coming, and there's billions of them! Edit: Also, I've been playing around with a 3D model of Battle Frontier for a bit. We are unlikely to ever return anywhere near the Macross 7 fleet, but if there ever was anything set there in the future, how far off do you think I'd be with this interpretation of Battle 7?

A little something I've been working on: In the background is the Minivalks 3D printable Battle 7 for comparison, in the foreground is my attempt at creating an "updated" Battle 7 by colorizing the Battle Frontier model from the game. I'm still missing a few panels and a couple of stripes compared to the Battle 25 flight deck textures, but I'm definitely able to have fun with this.. .:D

They did see plenty of use though - aside from standing around on the hull and potting battlepods that got close, as well as the Daedalus attack, they were also used in the city (both in the few fights that broke into the city, and for rubble cleaning and construction work. I distinctly remember it was a destroid that opened the way into the hull section where Minmei and Hikaru were sealed into.) The only one of the original destroid designs I'd consider retiring without replacement is the Tomahawk, because it's a tank on legs that's supposed to fight other tanks on legs, and it never really had the mobility for what it needed to do. The Defender was already upgraded into the Super Defender, filling a similar role to the Cheyenne. The Phalanx, I could easily imagine having a use in the modern era, as missiles never go out of style. The Spartan I'd consider turning into a police mecha, Patlabor style, because mixed Macro/Miclone communities exist, as well as work destroids. Though I suppose the canon solution is Macronized Zentraedi cops. The Monster was also already upgraded to give it all the mobility the original lacked and then some. I would *consider*, maybe, tomahawking or phalanxing the Cheyenne chassis (i.e. giving it bigger, slower-firing guns, or large missile pods), Then again... given the vibe we see in the shows, it feels like only Zentraedi who crave the warrior lifestyle seem to sign up for ground combat duty and they'd be in Macro-scale mecha, which already have the mobility that the destroids lack.

+9

Yeah, Destroids make more sense in the "defending against other ground units" role, but since Plus combat has gone more towards the "lightning VF raids", I do wish we'd have seen more destroids in Delta since they're noted to be cheaper to produce than VFs and Brisingr Cluster isn't giving off "super rich" vibes. Then again, while watching the Aerial knights fly face first into a crossfire set up by a bunch of Super Defenders and Cheyenne IIs and get deleted would have been amusing, it would have made for a short show if the enemies ran out in episode 3. ;D

Is there a source for it being *smaller*? M3 has no info on it at all (no Delta articles), and there's basically no info about the work destroid from Frontier either, so it's really difficult to tell how big the Frontier model is. While it's obvious that they're related, and that both are related to the Cheyenne II, But drawing conclusions about scale due to shared components is kind of dangerous due to how many variants there are of the same mesh at different scale in other cases. (I'm looking at the beam turrets from the Northampton/Stealth Cruiser/Gefion, which exist at *at least* three different sizes, possibly as many as five...)

There's a Destroid for everything. Shame we don't get to see them very often anymore.... Speaking of, I decided to rewatch Delta ep 1 to check out Hayate's dance number, and his work destroid is really interesting. It's not the same model as the one from frontier, but it looks related; it should also be decently easy to scale since the containers look like they're just 20-foot ISO containers. I'm a little irritated by the container ship though. At first glance it looks like those could be ISO containers, but when you look closer they're not as tall as they're wide, unlike the real things. So trying to scale the ship's height by the number of containers doesn't work. What I *can* tell is that there's space for at least 20 (width) by 20 (length) by 12 (height) of the small containers we see from the front, though the bigger containers in the back are harder to calculate. If those *are* supposed to be ISO 20-foot containers, were looking at 4800 TEU worth of capacity, which is mid-sized for an ocean-going ship (those go up beyond 20,000 TEU, but also down to a few hundred).