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).

You can't really scale by "small compartments" though, because in that case I could go "the Nimitz class has really a really small toilet, so it must be a really small ship". And the size of the bridge seems to vary quite a bit. Just for reference, the bridge window on the Elysion at "canon" scale is just over 11 meters wide at its widest point. I think this is a fair bit wider than 11 meters, personally,especially since the window needs to go over the sides of those grey pods too. I just don't have the skills to scale it properly. By single level, I meant that there's only one deck for the fighters, but there's more than that in the back because you also have the upper hangar just below the bridge. And back there there's enough volume for it to go deeper, as well. Not so much in the rest of the ship, since there's visible machinery.

The interior shots make the ship look *huge* if you know what you're actually looking at. To wit, the hangar where the VF-31s are lined up three wide, wings out, boosters attached, has to be able to fit inside the core hull of the Aether, because the ship is in space and the deck is flat. I took the fold-down flight deck extensions off the game model to see what the core hull looked like, and it is quite narrow. But it does have very distinct hangar bay side looking details right under the deck where you'd expect them to be. This is roughly the arrangement used in the hangar bay shot from Episode 12. I used the wrong fighters in more than one respect - since I used the printable models instead of game assets, my computer really doesn't like moving them all around, and since they're Siegfried instead of Kairos models, they're actually taking up less space. I'll see if I have a video game Kairos to use for more experimentation. This is with the Aether at 600 meters, which is *about* 50% larger than the "canon" scale, with Elysion being something like 1450 meters overall. Now imagine trying to fit that on the official size of the ship... As you can see, there's still issues - the ship is not quite wide enough, and VF-31As would stick out more, so I'm going to need to scale it up a bit further (10 to 20%) to make the fighters fit in that section of the hangar. Also, the hangar narrows forward, but there should be room for at least 20 more fighters two abreast in the forward section. And before you go "but you could put them further back where the hull is wider", the problem with that is that there's another shot where Delta lines up five wide below the deck, and that has to fit somewhere as well. And if you try it with the roughly 400 meter long Aether suggested by the Burj Kalifa statement, their wings will be clipping through the side of the hull. Something to remember when comparing Aether to the other carriers is that: 1 - compared to all the others, Aether is really skinny, I mean seriously skinny. 2 - Aether looks like it's designed with a single, normal-height hangar deck along the lines of a real carrier, or Prometheus or ARMD-L, rather than the high-volume hangars of the Guantanamo or Uraga 3 - the entire lower hull of the ship is the Macross Cannon.

Yeah, the "TV" SDF-1 from Hasegawa was a major letdown. At least they put those scalloped cutouts on the inside of the gun booms on the Assault mode, on the Fortress version those were missing and the main gun booms were just rectangular. For myself, the whole issue basically stems from "Hey, I have all these neat 3D models of both the ships and the fighters and I want to make a diorama of ships with fighters on the decks, but... they don't fit when the ship is sized as in the book". From there, my conclusion is "book is wrong, I must find a better size". Seto Kaiba's conclusion is "Book is correct, it must be an animation error". (even when it means making large changes to the model to fix the issue...) The process of finding the "better size" is ongoing. I'm not married to 200% of Chronicle scale, or to using the same scale factor for every ship. I'm just looking for each individual ship type for "the size where it works". (And *then* we can make RPG stats for them, that I'll never use...)

Sort of. There *is* consistency in the actual animation, much of the time. It's just that except for the VFs, it's not consistent with the *chronicle*. Seto Kaiba and I have a difference of opinion about whether to throw out the animation that doesn't match the Chronicle specs as "animation error", or whether to throw out the Chronicle specs that don't match what we see on screen as "textual inaccuracies".

A VF-25 can get through the *front* gate, if folded up with the fins down. The rear landing strip is too narrow, even if the opening is as wide as the front one. To make both ends work, I need to go up to 150% of the modeled size, and at that point, I feel like I might as well make the nice bridge from the line art fit as well, and go up to 200%. And 40 fighters is just the maximum I think is feasible at this size, which is nice because it makes the size of Operation Stargazer feasible. Guantanamo, being scaled up similarly, will have other benefits over the Gefion - you can launch a König Monster out of the front maw; and the Gefion has no place to launch space-type Ghosts without landing gear out of, while the Guantanamo has plenty. Hmm. I would like to know what the other instances are if you can point me in a rough direction. Guantanamos are in the background everywhere, but they're pretty much always the "Maiduru" model. And if you're talking about Macross 7 or Macross Plus, I'm willing to call "animation error" or "model superseded" on those. It's still never plot relevant what size the ship is, though. Scaling this ship up by the same factor as the Northampton does not meaningfully change what we know about it. The model is definitely larger than the official size says - there are similar issues with hangar bay opening widths as there are for Gefion, with wings clipping the sides of the walls at "official" scale. Not to mention the ginormous size of the ship from its establishing shot. This is our first overall shot of the Elysion. Note the fighters on the deck. Since we know their size, we can estimate fairly accurately the length of the Aether. It has to be pretty substantial. I didn't do the math myself, someone on reddit did a long time ago, but it worked out to around 900 meters give or take. This was supported by this shot, which has the fighters in the same parked configuration. The flight deck here is somewhere around 200 meters wide at the widest point. In episode 12, we have this interior hangar shot, showing fighters arranged in a configuration that's around 60 meters wide. There are 15 fighters shown in this sequence (five on the right, as there's a gap; four in the middle, and the six you can see on the left), we don't know how far the line extends backwards. At the official size of the ship, the hull is not wide enough for this below decks - if Elysion is 900 meters overall, then Aether's hull is around 40 meters wide at best. If the ship is the size indicated by the first two shots, then there's enough space for this to be only half the complement. So, the first half of the show has a bunch of this stuff where it's obvious that this is not a small vessel... and then the script sends everyone off so that only Delta is on hand most of the time. Also, at the "official" size, only *one* of the ten obvious flight deck access points for VFs are actually large enough for a VF-31 - the centerline tunnel from under the upper deck. The side tunnels are too narrow and the wings will clip; and both the four deck edge elevators and the three elevators up to the upper deck are too small. Also, forget the "tour bus" shuttle, it won't fit anywhere. Could the role the script gives to the Elysion have been handed to a smaller ship? Very likely. Was the Elysion intended to be small? No. There's enough evidence to the contrary in the first half of the show to put paid to that idea. (I don't know when the Burj Kalifa statement was made, but most of the evidence prior to the halfway point of the show suggests the larger size. I think there's an outlier in the form of the space episode, it's almost five in the morning and I'm not going digging). Edit: Having slept on it and had time to do the digging, Episode 6 definitely shows the fighters not clipping into each other's lanes during the launch sequence, which suggests a minimum size of around 1200 meters overall for Elysion in ship form, and 1500 is about the minimum for the fighters to fit on the elevators. I may try to replicate the parked fighters on the Aether's deck from Episode 2 at this size,. and the launch layout from episode 6, but at first glance, 1500 looks about right for Elysion as shown in the first half of the show. I am aware that later depictions, like the Delta movies, made the ship smaller, but as mentioned, at the smaller size there are problems just getting the fighters to the deck through the provided openings... Yeah. As I said, the New Macross class ships are some of the ones that don't really benefit from being scaled up other than keeping the animations the same. (Edit: Though.... the Diamond Force launch sequence suggests the bridge block of the Battle 7 is a fair bit larger than the overall views of the ship supports, if the ship is 1600 meters overall. The hatches and launch arms for that sequence are not small, and the best attempt I've seen at replicating the Battle 7 in 3D, has those hatches at around half the required size. It is not an official model so it won't count for anything, though. And swapping the base design to the Battle 25 version, which has a much bigger bridge block to begin with, and trading the turrets for launch bays? That would solve it even at the 1-mile scale). The opening sequence goes "Miria is racing, Max and new daughter are playing pool in a building overlooking the race, Max gets an alert on his watch, Milia gets one in her helmet, leaves the race to join Max on the highway, cut to Max and Milia in their fighters with the daughter waving at them from the control booth, and the fighters pulling out of the Megaroad's side pod." My inference was that this was all on the ship, but since the ship is over a terrestrial planet, maybe they took a shuttle up so they could scramble their fighters....? Meh. Also, given that the Chronicle changed the number of colonists aboard the Megaroad from 80,000 to 25,000 according to Macross Mecha Manual, I'll withdraw my other reason for changing the size of it (namely, the sheer amount of space the colonists' living quarters will take up. Half the population of the original Macross in a volume that is already *ginormously* bigger is much more plausible.) The TV macross has next to nothing in common with the DYRL macross except for the transformation sequence itself, none of the components themselves are shared. If that's a rebuild, they tore her down to atoms and reconstituted them... But since DYRL macross never interacts with anything that my scale change has affected, it can stay at its official size.

I would pull the "animation error" card on the "Maizuru" model instead of the "Maiduru" model, yeah. We never see it very often (I can only remember the scene from Frontier 1, and Itsuwari no Utahime), whereas the Maiduru model shows up all the time. But here's the thing. The one thing I actually care about really is "make the Gefion work as a carrier without changing its model". It is a very very nice model, it is just too small. But it doesn't need to be *four times* the size to work - the hangar pods are wide and tall enough to work at just *twice* the size, if I throw out the "battroid walks in the back door" screenshot as an animation error. There's enough clearance - barely - to move fighters from the pods into the hull; and the hull would have enough volume to hold around 40 fighters. And now that we have a modern carrier version of the Northampton, we toss out the Stargazer animation, and declare "Stargazer was a Gefion-type all along". The script, aside from the VFX callouts, will work. From there, let's look at what scaling each ship up by the same factor does for us: Starting with the Maiduru model, the largest hangar access ports will now be large enough to squeeze a VF through, and the small ones are big enough for a Ghost. We're tossing the Maizuru model as an animation error, it is not plot relevant that the Guantanamo-class is a specific size beyond it being able to launch fighters. The Stealth Cruiser does not have a stated size in the first place, our estimates are based on the size of the Northamptons it shares the scene with anyway. Scaling it up to twice the size just means it's 2 x unknown. The Quarter, I've complained about for years and years is too small to do what we see it doing in the show. The ARMD-L is too thin for a hangar, the elevators on the model are too small for the fighters, and at one point we see it flying in formation with *dozens* of SMS VF-25As who which had to come from somewhere, and there is no room inside that ship for them. Scaling it up to twice the size solves nearly everything. I would not bet 100% on the hangar capacity, but it's a lot less implausible at least. The Elysion, as mentioned a few times already, looks like it was modeled by a VFX artist at one size, and then some time after episode 2 aired, someone outside the VFX department declared it was the height of Burj Kalifa and then the model was resized without any further work being done, resulting in a bunch of weirdness. Like the VF-31 not being able to fit through the hangar access ports between the main flight deck and the upper flight deck. Scaling it up to twice its "canon" size would basically restore it to where it was originally, and allow VFs to use the facilities, as it were. The Uraga... doesn't need a resize, that one was well thought through at its canon size, and it's almost a shame to change it. If I can't write off the size discrepancy as an animation error, well at least it now has an easier time handling large battroids like Queadluun-Rau/Rhea, or the VB-6 König Monster. The New Macross Class... also doesn't need a resize, other than for matching the animation. But at least scaling them up will also scale the cities up, and give four times more area and eight times the volume to play around with. And if we play a little with the "new design iterations supersede old versions of the same design", then City 7 is now Island-One sized, but double the canon, which means that scenes like Basara living in a slum miles from the city are more plausible, because there are actual miles to drive! If we want to go even further and bring up ships which never share a scene with any of the above? DYRL Macross would benefit greatly from being twice the size because there'd be room for a cityscape inside the ship, and I think I measured at one point that the ARMDs at their canon size would have trouble with the launch scene from the opening sequence because the ports are too small. I'll have to revisit that sometime. I don't remember if the DYRL Macross ever punched anything in the face that would need to be rescaled, but I'm willing to call "animation error" to avoid this becoming a problem. Megaroad-01 at double the size might actually have room for that racetrack from the M3 intro. TV Macross would not work, though, because Daedalus and Prometheus are already ridiculously large for surface ships. But TV Macross is technically not canon anyway because it was superseded by the DYRL version. Macross The First Macross would not work either, for the same reason as above. Edit: Illustration of what 2x size will do for certain ships Above: the Macross Chronicle sizes for everything. Notice the ludicrous size of VB-6 relative to the Quarter, and how the VF-25 does not fit the hangar pod on Gefion. VB-6 and VF-25 scaled down to 50%, which is the same as scaling up the ships to 200% except I don't have to move them around to maintain the formation. Notice how the VB-6 fits the elevator now (it completely fits if you fold the wingtips up), and how the VF-25 will fit on the landing side of the ship too.

Thanks! And I can agree that it's likely that the artists involved never double-checked with each other and this is why we ended up like this. I'm coming at this from both the Star Wars fandom, where "see that speck over there? It's a thing, with stats, and we have to figure them out" has been a thing since the 80s and where if the book doesn't match what's seen on screen we make a stink and sometimes get it changed; and the model building scene, where models in the same scale have to fit, and if they don't they're not the same scale and need correcting. In this case, the models did not fit at what was supposed to be the same scale, so obviously the scale on one of them was wrong. And.... it wasn't going to be the Variable Fighters. As mentioned, I think it's a little beyond "an" animation error, where every scene in the whole episode involving fighters relative to the ship show the ship to be much, much bigger than the book said it was. It was basicially the whole episode that was the animation error. And when this was the "hero" episode for that ship, the one episode which *focused* on the ship in question? I find it easier to throw the book out than the episode, as mentioned. And yeah, the point of showing the ships side by side was to show that only about a third of the total length of the Northampton at this scale is suitable for a hangar, as opposed to two thirds to three quarters of the carriers Seto Kaiba mentioned; and the real carrier has some *serious holes* in the side for the aircraft to leave the hangar through, which would need to go somewhere. I can make a "baby carrier" 250 meter Northampton. It would look like it came out of Star Wars, because of the side mounted hangar bays, and it would have to drop the forward torpedo tubes, but I can make it. But it would not be the Stargazer. And it wouldn't be the Gefion. Both of which are shown launching fighters in a way that make them much bigger than 250 meters... The full context was "it can't function as a carrier for the nearly 40 fighters launched out of the Stargazer", because there's not enough cubic volume in it suitable for a hangar of sufficient size. Even the FANKY version only managed 29 fighters total, and that was with the huge belly hangar/flight deck, which is not what we see in either Macross 7 or Macross 30. I repeat - even the FANKY version could not launch the 36 + 1 fighters called for in the episode script. Also, the problem with your examples of real world carriers is that 1 - all of them have two thirds to three quarters of their full length, and their full hull width, devoted to hangar floor space, in a triple-height deck; and 2 - basically every carrier's listed capacity has half the aircraft up on deck, because they won't fit in the hangar. A Nimitz-class only has room for 34 jets and six helicopters below deck. It has a hangar that is nearly as big as the whole Northampton by footprint area, being a 206 x 33 meter almost-rectangle, and it still only fits that number of jets. On the Northampton, only the center third of it is even thick enough and wide enough for a hangar, because the ship tapers sharply both towards the ends and from the centerline. There isn't really room for more than one level of hangars either, because of the taper. And as I said above, I can probably make a 250 meter Northampton into a carrier that can take some VFs without altering the profile, but it won't look like either the Gefion or the Stargazer, it most certainly would not be capable of launching a 36 fighter alpha strike as shown in Macross 7. And even with all that... I could not fit the official bridge design inside the conning tower, because it's at least two person-heights wide and the bridge window on the model (which is accurate proportionally to the old line art) is only 2.3 meters. Enough people involved in the production of Macross 7 and Macross 30 ignored the 250 meter length for their hero unit spaceship, to make that 250 meter figure irrelevant.

Bandai? Do a grunt model in plastic for Macross? Has that ever happened? (well, aside from the VF-171 non-scale, I think)

And some people - demonstrably, because this is what happened in the other place I've been posting about it - go "okay, your argument is convincing, What does this mean for the other ships? Which ships can we do similar comparisons to?" because most of them are also Star Wars fans who remember when the Executor was changed from 8 km to 19 km because of determined fans fact-checking Lucasfilm until they gave up; Star Trek fans who remember when the Defiant would change size from episode to episode; Stargate fans who used screen evidence to prove the liner notes false years before the VFX people chimed in and said "yeah, we actually made it three times bigger and some dude in PR pulled a number out of his behind and since we no longer work for the rights holders we can't change it". It's said that during the middle ages, a learned man who was asked "how many teeth does a horse have", he'd go find his copy of Aristotle's textbook on the matter, and go "Aristotle says it has X teeth, therefore that is the answer." One of the hallmarks of the Renaissance was when the default option shifted to "I don't know, lets go to the stable and check". You, my friend... are being medieval in mindset, and trusting the Philosopher over your own senses.

You mean, no one else who frequents this site has the energy to argue with someone who refuses to budge on "the books are always right". It's not the length, it's the shape. An aircraft carrier is has an optimized shape for volume, and basically every carrier has a rectangular hangar that goes from the stern of the ship up to two third to three quarters if its full length, and the full width of the ship. The Northampton class can *at most* use *one* third of its length as a hangar, and the bit it can use is only marginally wider than normal carrier. The volume usable for a hangar is only big enough for about a dozen fighters, packed like sardines (i.e. not with the kind of walkaround space that you'd want on a real carrier). And no version of the ship has the kind of hangar access port which would be required in order to *use* this space - you'd need Star Wars Style side mounted hangar doors on both sides to turn this into anything close to an acceptable "baby carrier", and that's not what's been done for *any* of the three attempts at it. If the upper deck is just storage, the the capacity is just 29 fighters. But okay. The whole reason why I am even arguing this is because, if I want to use the Gefion design in a 3D scene, doing its thing, I need to make it 1000 meters long, to be visually consistent with what we see in the game (i.e. being able to walk a battroid in there.) My brain does not allow me to fudge things, things have to fit at true size, or my brain hurts. If the Gefion has to be 1000 meters long to support the best scale-able visuals, then I will also need to make the Northampton the same size, because it is the same ship. Again, my brain would hurt because of the inconistency if I didn't. Similarly, the Guantanamo-class, at least the one I have, also has features from the anime that my brain says "this has to be *this big* to work properly, So I sized the ship appropriately. If I had a model based on the *other* Guantanamo shooting model (the "Maizuru" model, instead of the "Maiduru"; I wouldn't have so much of a problem, but I *might* just go with "if there's two inconsistent models, they might be different ships". Which is a common trick in for example the Star Wars fandom. I also arrive at this from *several* fandoms where "if the number obviously doesn't fit, throw it out and calculate the actual one" is what we *do*. A building consistently shown with 30 floors is obviously not going to be 100 feet tall, it's going to be 100 meters tall. If a ship is obviously more than ten times the size of another ship, of course it's not going to be just 5 times the size even if the books have said so for 20 years. So what I'm doing is I'm using the official models to figure out what I think is the actual size implied by the VFX shots, just like fans have been doing in every other Sci Fi franchise since the dawn of DVD freeze frames, and checking how weird things looks if I use those sizes. The answer, so far, is "not very", despite the Uraga being unchanged size-wise. There just aren't all that many shots of the Uraga model dwarfing a Northampton that I'd need to ignore. And I will never really accept a book size figure if the very first instance where that size would have become relevant, flat out ignored it for plot reasons. It literally has the same vibe as the time the studio that animated all the VFX for Stargate SG-1 made the whole Daedalus ship at 650 meters long, down to the bridge and hangar interiors, and because someone corporate wrote "225 meters" in a DVD liner booklet, the ship is now officially so small that the fighters it launches out by the dozens will not actually fit through the hangar bay doors that are now a third of the size they were designed to be.