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SebastianP

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Everything posted by SebastianP

  1. SebastianP
    Really? Either we're talking at complete cross purposes here, or you didn't actually read the book you're claiming to source your info from, or you didn't *look at the aircraft involved*, or some combination of the above. Because that's so blatantly false that posting it undermines your credibility in *general*. Yes, the genesis of the VF-1 did not involve the Tomcat at all, but the resdesign that gave it its final form? Someone had a good long look a the Tomcat and liked what they saw, because you don't get *so many* otherwise unique features and combinations of features from a single design into one of your own unless you're literally staring at it while drawing your own thing. Especially when you end up slapping an iconic Tomcat paint scheme (recently popularized by a movie) on your Tomcat-shaped creation. (The thing about the supposed other inspirations is that the Su-27 and MiG-29, the other possible sources for some of the design elements used in the VF-1... weren't seen by westerners other than by spy satellite until 1986.)
  2. SebastianP
    Keep in mind that the whole concept of Macross was changing throughout 1980 and 1981, and that both Kawamori and Miyatake were working on the Diaclone toyline in 1980 (says Wikipedia at least). Originally Macross was supposed to be a silly parody, and then it evolved into a more serious show. Also, it turns out that The Final Countdown, rather than having a release delay in Japan as happens sometimes, actually released almost a month earlier over there than it did in the US, on July 5, 1980. So I can see Kawamori learning how to do transforming robots working for Takara, starting to work on a transforming fighter for the parody show he's planning with Studio Nue, and then when the concept for the show turned serious, going "this fighter does not look realistic enough for a more serious show, I'll start over and try to make a Diaclone-style robot that looks like a serious fighter instead", and picking the Tomcat as the base because swing wings and twin tails are more easily tucked away during a transformation. And pairing well with the Jolly Rogers tails. Nothing in that is keeping anyone from re-using the better elements of the old design, like the robot mode components that remained. Final design wise, there pretty much aren't any explanations more plausible than "Kawamori saw The Final Countdown", because the Jolly Rogers tails must have come from somewhere and there weren't that many practical places for him to have seen them. Even model kits bearing the Jolly Rogers tails didn't actually start releasing until the late 80s as far as I've been able to tell (courtesy of Hasegawa in 1989 and Heller in 1990 in 1/72 scale, and IIRC later still in 1/48 scale). The expense must have been utterly ruinous without a pre-existing point of departure from our history though, at least going by what's known now (over what was known when Macross Zero was released). Then again it probably wasn't well known that the US had specifically destroyed critical parts of the tooling for the Tomcats to prevent parts from being exported at the time when Zero was made.
  3. SebastianP
    Actually, the real life reason why the VF-1 looks like a Tomcat probably has something to do with the movie "The Final Countdown", which came out in 1980, and starred the Tomcat in the flashiest incarnation of the VF-84 Jolly Rogers paint scheme, which was only used for a few years (on the Tomcat at least, a variation had been used on the Phantom previously), and which had never visited Japan. Unless Kawamori was a collector of what was referred to as "airplane porn" (so called because it was printed by the same people and laid out in the same style as porn mags, only with airplane photos), that's about the only chance he'd have of being exposed to the Jolly Rogers paint scheme given that the squadron lived in the Atlantic and hadn't visited the Pacific since Vietnam. Design-wise, the VF-1 is only superficially similar to the Tomcat anyway, what with being much smaller, with smaller engines, and differently shaped *everything*. The only similarities are in their broad outline, and even then the VF-1 doesn't have the gigantic horizontal tails of the Tomcat. Even the VF-0 isn't based on the Tomcat, it's just the VF-1 scaled up because they didn't have the thermonuclear turbines ready and couldn't make conventional turbines with enough power. Once that was decided on they did use Tomcats as testbeds for some tech. As for why Tomcats were still around in 2008 in the Macrossverse when they were all decommissioned in 2006 in the real world... chalk that up to Kawamori being a fan of the design, I suppose. It is explained that in universe they were upgraded and stuff, but the divergence either has to have been before 1999 (because Tomcat production, and spare part production, had ended in the early 1990s), or production had to have been restarted due to the war (at likely *massive* expense, due to a lot of the production tooling having been deliberately destroyed in the 1990s to prevent new parts from being made and shipped to Iran.)
  4. SebastianP
    There's way too many differences between the YF-30 and VF-31 for Hasegawa to be able to re-use pretty much any part of the VF-31, other than *possibly* the "feet". And while I'd have to study the layout of the runners in detail to be sure, I do know that the VF-31AX would require at least a new forward fuselage, canopy, outer wings, and weapons pod, possibly more. Which leaves basically just the legs and the central fuselage/inner wing assembly. (Please take a good look at Anymoon.com's comparisons of the YF-30 and the VF-31, while the two have similar layouts, none of the *details* are the same shape). Attempting to reuse parts where they really shouldn't have is how Hasegawa ended up screwing up the TV-versions of their 1/4000 SDF-1 - the TV version has a concave undercut on the bottom of the main gun booms that's very prominent, but it's missing on the model because Hasegawa tried to re-use that subassembly from the DYRL version of the kit, and the DYRL version of the SDF-1 didn't have that undercut.
  5. SebastianP
    So the question I'm asking myself is, who wrote these specs? Did whoever used to write them leave the Macross team? Is this another "first printed source cannot be contradicted even when it's an obvious typo" situation? Screwy official specs is nothing new, you know my views on the ships. Or, you know, someone could have looked at the spec progression and gone "this curve is more than a little crazy, let's chill out for a bit." With regards to the later discussion of which generation the VF-31 belongs to... Later generation does not and never has implied "better specs across the board". The shift in generations usually comes from applying some critical new technology that lets it compete in a different weight class despite lower specs. In the real world "generation" is a marketing buzzword to be sure, but if you look at the definitions you can clearly see that it's not a raw specs issue. I struggle to remember any hard spec in which the F/A-18 Hornet beats out the F-4 Phantom, but the Hornet is still counted as a 4th generation fighter while the Phantom is a 3rd generation one, and I think most air forces would rather have the Hornet than the Phantom if given the option unless they specifically need the longer range, because the Hornet flies easier, has much improved electronics, and is cheaper to operate. "Fifth Generation" fighters in the real world are simply those with radical low observability built into their airframes, which means the F-22, the Su-57, the F-35 and that one Chinese thing I don't remember the number of are all "Fifth generation", because they have that one killer tech that lets them dictate when the fight is happening unless they're up against each other. In Macross, I don't know what the differences between first, second and third generation are, but "fourth generation" fighters were those with independent orbit capability, "fifth generation" are those with Inertial Storage Converters (which means that in terms of generation, the VF-171EX is the same generation as the VF-25 or VF-27; but the standard VF-171 may even be third generation depending on whether it can make orbit on its own). The Master File writers have apparently decided that having a fold quartz boost system is what makes a VF "sixth generation", which make the Siegfried and Kairos Plus "sixth generation" same as the Durandal and the Chronos, while the Kairos is fifth generation like the Messiah and Lucifer, despite not having the improved baseline specs you expect. (Hell, the Kairos is probably a low-end 6th generation fighter as well. It's not boosted *much*, but it is boosted, using fold carbon instead of fold quartz. ) Anyway, the most interesting thing in the previews revealed so far to me was "CV/C-122 Laertius". Always good to have more ship names.
  6. SebastianP
    The VF-11 is deserving of its own Master File book. It has everything: Massive production run; flown by a main character (if only briefly on screen, in a flashback); in service for a long time as the primary fighter; multiple *logical* variants (B, C, D, Thunderseeker; none of this "give it different heads for different characters" stuff); *loads* of pre-existing FAST-pack type additions including an actual Armored pack; and its service introduction is during one of the "gaps" in the Macross timeline (between M3 and Seven). Also, consider how many fighters you'd need to defend a planet; and how many of those 30,000 may have been attrition replacements.
  7. SebastianP
    Well, finding the thing in modern catalogues is beyond me because the one catalogue that allows you to search by historical information (i.e. I can enter 1810 as a date) requires more info than I have (the hell is an LST?) so I can't figure out what it's called today. Immensely frustrating that the astronomical databases have such arcane search interfaces. Also.... there are no stars matching Groombridge 1816's apparent magnitude of 6.7 at the distance given from Sol in the OVA (11.7 LY).
  8. SebastianP
    It would really help if I had table headings for that so I could see what each column meant and could track it down by its characteristics. The only search result on google mentioning 1816 says this: g Macross Plus, OVA anime television series and compilation film. Groombridge 34 is a possible location of the fictitious "Groombridge 1816" (Helios) system, stated to be 11.7 light years from the Solar System, about the same distance as Groombridge 34 (11.62 ly). Planet Eden, located within the Groombridge 1816 system, is the location of the New Edwards Test Flight Center and its major city, Eden City. The name Groombridge 1816 may be an alteration of the name of the real star Groombridge 1618.
  9. SebastianP
    I couldn't find a Groombridge 1816, so I'm presuming you (or someone else) typoed Groombridge 1618, which is *very* interesting. Groombridge 1618 has been suspected of having a planet with a 122.5 day year since 1989, and the orbital period puts the planet (if it exists) right in the middle of the star's habitable zone. That the planet would have a mass about four times that of Jupiter is a later discovery. Some of the astronomers working on it have said that it sits in one of the sweet spots for possible evolved life, though that was kind of recently (2019). It's also close to earth relatively speaking (15.88 lightyears), and of course it's *not* any of the stars making up Alpha Centauri or any of the other overused "first colony" stars. Not that there's anything wrong with using those, because they are spectacularly interesting given that Rigil Kentaurus (Alpha Centauri A) is the same spectral class as Sol, and Proxima Centauri has a confirmed earth-sized planet in its habitable zone.... but since Proxima Centaruri is tiny, the orbital period of the planet is 11.5 days.
  10. SebastianP
    It's not just the A-6 and the A-10 either. Pretty much every ejection seat-equipped aircraft with a bubble canopy that was designed for low-and-slow flight has a canopy destruct system, including the F-35B. In high speed flight, it's usually enough to just lift the canopy front edge up enough to make the wind rip the thing off, but it only works when there's enough airspeed. There were some bad accidents during the 50s and 60s with early supersonic jets where they'd gone into flat spins with not enough airflow over the canopy for it to come off and the pilot was stuck riding the aircraft into the ground. I heard about one particular incident involving the original Draken when I was in the Swedish Air Force where the pilot had kept calm and reported the entire way down knowing that he was going to die because his canopy wouldn't come off. After that, they fitted explosive canopy separators to both the Draken and subsequent Swedish aircraft. And even *with* explosive separators, it's sometimes not enough - Goose's death in Top Gun was based on a real incident, and the Tomcat had pyrotechnic canopy removers. If I recall correctly, the NACES seats used on the F-14D and the Super Hornet were specifically made taller so that even if you did smash into the canopy it would be the seat taking the hit. For aircraft specifically intended to operate very low and very slow, where there's significant risk that even explosive separators won't provide enough separation in time, they use canopy destruction systems instead and basically blow the thing up before shooting the ejection seat through the hole. Considering that the canopy of a jet can be up to a half inch thick, anything that helps remove it as an obstacle or weakens it before you have to ram your head through it is kind of a good idea.
  11. SebastianP
    "Godwin's law: As an online discussion grows longer (regardless of topic or scope), the probability of a comparison to Nazis or Adolf Hitler approaches 1". I was just remarking that since you already brought him up, I didn't have to restrain myself because the damage was done. I'm *not* trying to invoke any of the corollaries (such as the "someone mentioned the H word, thread over" that we used to have on USENET), but we're running close to invoking one of the others (any discussion in which Godwin's law is invoked will devolve into either discussion about Godwin's law itself, or whether the comparison to Hitler was valid). Anyway, there's a difference of scope, and consequences of actions. And the range of possible intents that would justify the action. Cutting someone open *can* be justified, it's potentially a lifesaving procedure after all. Murdering every member of a culture? You'll find that much, much harder to find a justification for without going full fantasy "they breed sapients as cattle to eat their babies as a delicacy" - which is in itself a form of genocide.
  12. SebastianP
    Pengbuzz brought up the German dictator first, hence my saying the thread was Godwinned already. And the antagonists in Macross can certainly be evil - not on a per faction level, but certainly on the individual level. And a traumatic backstory *does not excuse* attempted genocide, or else the Failed Austrian Painter would be excused due what he witnessed in WW1. We don't excuse him. We don't excuse any of the historical despots who engaged in similar behavior, or ordered it to happen. Some actions are evil in themselves and no motive can excuse them - torture, slavery and genocide being among the ones we've basically agreed on as a species. Oh, and IIRC non-consensual non-lifesaving medical procedures is on that list somewhere... like forcibly or stealthily installed mind control implants (though the definition is originally meant to cover things like forcible sterilization or mutilations). That there are no designated "always chaotic evil" factions, or that there are no "stupid evil" or "evil for evil's sake" villains doesn't mean there aren't outright evil villains in the setting - they're typically the ones that end up killed by the protagonists instead of Defeat-is-Friendshipped or "heroic sacrificed". Leon Mishima from Frontier TV was evil because he was willing to have his president murdered (and in the novels, his VP too) so he could be the leader of Frontier in their glorious conquest of the Vajra homeworld and be "King Macross" like he'd dreamed of since he was a kid in the slums. The Galaxy Cabal from the Frontier movies were evil because they were treating human beings as parts in their machine - quite literally discussing harvesting organs from Ranka to stick in Sheryl before deciding to just take control of Ranka instead and discard Sheryl. Ushio Todo is evil because he's only interested in his own selfish goal, where his revised timeline ends up with him getting everything he ever wanted and a HFY future afterwards, and frakk everyone who got deleted because they'll never be born in his new timeline - including all his henchpeople, since it wasn't clear that he actually *had* any protection from getting them paradoxed out of existence or if he was spinning a yarn to make his pawns go along. That Mishima and Todo have traumas does not excuse them - they're still rational sane individuals who are accountable for their actions.
  13. SebastianP
    Since the thread was already Godwinned by someone - the Nazis goals were noble and their means justified in their own heads as well. Everyone else disagreed, all their leaders which were still alive to be captured and tried were hung for it, and both post-war power blocks rubbed their entire nation's noses in it for several decades afterwards. We literally invented the concept of "crimes against humanity" to cover their *means*, as opposed to their motives or their ends. "Do not instigate genocide or you will be hung." Galaxy wants to turn everyone in to drones for the collective, with them on top. That is very clear from their own statements in the movie. Some of the voices in the brain collective are positively gleeful that soon it will be them on top. Setting aside all the murdering they went through in order to put themselves at the top, what they'd be doing is forcible brainwashing and deletion of culture because everyone will join them or die. Brera couldn't hang a computer full of cyberbrains so he blew them up instead, and Alto didn't have anything else on hand except a sniper rifle that's a memento of someone who was turned into a corpse to be stepped over for Galaxy's ambitions, but I'll take those. Todo wants to undo an *unsuccessful* genocide (the cultures survived - not intact, but not unrecognizable) - by performing a *total* genoicide (by erasing history the cultures that developed in the mean time would cease to have ever been without a trace), and he's duping most of his underlings into going along by playing it up as if they'd still *exist* after he was done rewriting a history in which they were never born in the first place. His trauma does not excuse his attempt to murder *billions*. Do not commit genocide. It cannot be justified. Ever. And he does indeed use "I must scream" type remote control, specifically on Aisha, who is still awake and aware and pleading for help while fighting her own limbs as she shoots Leon and clobbers Mina over the head and carries her off, at least in the game version. And he'd have to engage in even more mind control to put himself in as leader of Earth so he can enact his dream of making Humanity the top dogs in the Galaxy and subjugating the Zentraedi.
  14. SebastianP
    I disagree with Seto Kaiba's description of the motives of some of these factions as in any way noble, because there's some monstrous "means" being justified by those "noble" ends. Like the "I have no mouth and I must scream" remote control used by Macross Galaxy and by Havamal where the victims were basically looking on in horror as their bodies did things they didn't agree with (see Brera's *immediate* turnaround the moment the control implant broke, both in the show and the movies, especially the movie version which immediately went straight for the Galaxy brains to terminate them with extreme prejudice even if it cost him his life because he was that violated). Or the human experimentation and that they even discussed implanting parts of Ranka in to Sheryl to keep her useful before deciding to discard her and use Ranka as is instead. There was a *reason* why no one exactly batted an eye at all of Galaxy's leadership biting the dust in the movie; or that executing Grace in the TV series was considered a righteous move (since in the TV series she was portrayed as one of the masterminds, rather than a puppet of the cyber hivemind). There is a *reason* why no one disagrees Bodole Zer had to be put down. There is a *reason* why Keith decided to sacrifice himself to take out Roid. And why Windermere doesn't get more in-universe heat after the instigators of this whole thing are all dead. It's not your ends that decide if you're a monster. It's your means. I feel like Macross teaches us that most people would not choose war if they had a choice, and it's the people who take that choice away from others who are the monsters.
  15. SebastianP
    Given that stealth in space is impossible without such a device, but several of the VFs from the 2040s era were explicitly stealth fighters anyway? They either must have already had it back then, or there's such a massive continuity hole all of Macross just got swallowed up. So even if there's no explicit mention, the show doesn't work unless the thing exists. Also, active stealth is supposedly good enough by the fifth generation that designing according to passive stealth rules is unnecessary. (Read: Kawamori was bored with trying to make VFs that conformed to stealth rules and hand-waved it.)
  16. SebastianP
    Kawaiicore sounds like it's the name for the genre that Babymetal belongs to. What if the Hoary Froating Head turns his trollface to MAX and goes "boy band and all-female fighter squadron?" He said somewhere that one of the reasons they haven't done another male vocalist is that anyone they picked would have to compete with Basara's towering reputation which wouldn't be fair to either of them, Also, another absolute troll idea: Straight up Disney-style musical, complete with character songs for everyone. Seriously though, I want to see some more random expressions of culture that aren't the focus of an entire show. Opera, Choral, Musical, Classical music (can you make fold waves with only a musical instrument if you put Fold Quartz into it?), a flash mob concert, Zentraedi trying to create something that is theirs, other forms of *art* in general (I loved that Alto was part of a Kabuki family, though it was a bit aggressively Japanese... hence why I'd like to see classical opera surviving in the Macross-verse).
  17. SebastianP
    OK, so a short question: What kinds of music would you like to see represented in Macross that we haven't seen yet? I know Kawamori tries to change things up some, but Big West has to be able to sell the music so the main part of it can't be too out there, but I figure there are plenty of stuff that could work as one offs for an episode. So here are my ideas: 1. An actual space opera, Complete with a soprano singing in Italian. (Brought to you by one too many listenings to Libera Me From Hell from the Gurren Lagann soundtrack...) 2. The Full Size Zentraedi Army Choir singing glorious battle hymns. (Brought to you by one too many listenings to "Battle Hymn of the Republic" performed by various choirs.) 3. A Babymetal band. (This one might actually work as a centerpiece for a whole show...) 4. All the idols are down with the flu, and the colony is under attack. It's up to a plucky high school Karaoke club to step up to the plate. What they lack in training and raw skill, they'll make up for in enthusiasm, or die trying! No flashy holo-costumes or stage animations, just five girls and a boom box sharing a microphone. Bonus points if it *doesn't* end in them being recruited as professional singers right off the bat.
  18. SebastianP
    Gratuitous nudity? I can barely even remember what you're talking about here, except maybe a scene where the girls are relaxing in a Sauna together? I'll see you that and raise you the Minmei Shower Scene from the original TV series... or the improved Mk2 version from DYRL. There's no girl in Macross we see more of than Minmei, IIRC... The bouncing boobs girl is Makina - and that's her thing, she loves showing off what nature blessed her with and the reactions she gets from them. Especially the other girls. Also, the format of "artist on holographic scene doing concert number alternating with VF battle scenes" has been a staple since DYRL, and they've been doing it without cutting the music since Frontier. (In Macross Seven, the first performance by the band Fire Bomber is basically cut to shreds because they kept cutting back and forth between a song in progress the concert and the battle in space outside the colony. One of the many complaints about Seven is that despite there being four or five songs at the concert that we hear bits of, the only song they played in its entirety for the next several episodes is the one Basara belts out in the middle of the battle after he barges in with the Fire Valkyrie), and then tries again and again after that.) It's just that now the technology to animate dance numbers like this has finally gotten to a point where they can use it in anime and they love showing it off... and for the first time since the original series, Ichiro Itano wasn't involved in animating the battle scenes and the people who took over weren't anywhere near his skill.
  19. SebastianP
    Yeah, reuse is a definite thing. It was to the point where they didn't bother even putting a number on the 3D Uraga model and just wrote "NUNS" on the bow flight deck so they didn't have to bother... (and then there's the scene in the first Frontier movie where they're panning through the fleet tactical display and the same Northampton shows up in at least three different places, unless it basically teleported to get from where it was last seen to where it's seen next.) Macross movies are *probably* not supposed to be enjoyed in the format of frame by frame analysis, but how *else* am I going to find out how many gun turrets they stuck on the ships? Especially since they don't bother even describing the ships in the side materials anymore. The weird part to me is how they literally appear to have gone "oops, we forgot to put flight deck numbers on the Gigasion" when they got to the scene where it shoots the main gun. Also, one of these days I'm hoping we get a *non* homogenous fleet of Macross-type vessels, where there's multiple different types of Macross ships on screen. Having nine Macross ships show up for the battle and they're *all* Elysion-types? Or the multiple Quarters Sayonara no Tsubasa? Laaaaaazy. They could have added some Quarters to the Xaos fleet IMO, or some older Macross types to the SMS fleet. (and if anyone ever drops a licensed book with *believable* information for *all* the ships shown in 3D macross - as in, not completely at odds with the what's actually shown on screen - I'll be all over it).
  20. SebastianP
    Actually...
  21. SebastianP
    From what I remember of reading Battletech fanfiction, the Clans are mostly a threat because they have technological superiority (especially in military-applicable fields) and believe their culture is the be-all, end-all, and everyone else slots into the bottom of their caste system. Kind of like the Draka but in space. And the technological superiority they do have is because they spent one less century trying to blow each other up to decide who's on top of the heap than the rest of humanity, meaning they *lost* less tech, rather than developed it. The situation in Macross? They've spent 55 years engaging in absolutely breakneck technological progression, and while not everyone is sharing everything with everyone else, it's been a concerted effort with only minor disagreements on the whole, because everyone is acutely aware of the scale of the threat that surrounds the humans and their allies - namely, that there are thousands of fleets identical to the one that slagged Earth out there, and any one of them could decide humanity is too big a threat and try to finish the job at any moment. There's no way for a breakaway faction to have developed *even faster* in those 55 years to the point where they'd be a large-scale military threat to the forces we see in the shows and movies. The only way for Macross to run into something that would be a Clan-like antithesis to themselves is if they somehow get invaded by a Star Trek-like Mirror Universe or something. Also, the Clans as is? If they dropped into Macross, worlds and all, they'd be missing presumed eradicated due to pissing off the Zentraedi. Because the Zentraedi are just plain better at this whole "warrior race" thing.
  22. SebastianP
    Official statements may not have been made until 2008, but I think the evidence was there to see much earlier. And when the statement *was* made, it made sense in the context of what was already out there, because of the problems fans had fitting things together as it was. At any rate, the fandom was more or less prepared to find out what Kawamori's thoughts were on the setting, hence the minimal backlash. The Star Wars thing was because a huge amount of paying fans had invested a lot of money and a lot of time in the idea that the side materials were a coherent thing, and then had the rug jerked out from under their feet. That the whole Expanded Universe was a colossus built on feet of clay (the ever eroding lore from the older books where any statement that made Star Wars seem powerful was enshrined as gospel but entire sections of the same books were thrown out as inaccurate, to the point where I felt the only thing people even cared about from the Imperial Sourcebook was the definition of Base Delta Zero and that a Star Destroyer could pull that off solo, because it made the numbers big, or that the only statement anyone cares about from the novelization of The Empire Strikes Back is that the Avenger "vaporized" an asteroid, because it made the numbers big. etc.) The worst thing that ever happened to Star Wars was not the decanonization of the Expanded Universe, it was that Disney allowed the same numbers to be regurgitated again in fresh books after they cleaned the slate. The new movies? They barely even rate...
  23. SebastianP
    Macross gets away with it by never having pretended that there's a single true depiction to be found, or that all the things across all media actually happened to the same characters. DYRL basically throwing the original SDFM story out with the animation set the tone for the entire franchise that way, and because it's *always been that way*, there's no fan backlash because the long-timers like us know and will inform the newcomers what the score is on that front. Star Wars got backlash for deep-sixing the Expanded Universe because that had been the vast majority of the canon for quite a while - You can watch all the movies in a single day, but it would take a person literal years to go through all the books and comics. They kind of had to do it in order to make more movies in the first place without forcing movie-only fans to read thousands of hours worth of books to catch up and figure out what was going on (plus, by the time the main characters were the age of their actors, crap had *gone down* in the GFFA and Star Wars wasn't really recognizable anymore. Also, *so many things* happened to the main characters that you'd have to wonder when they had time to *sleep*). And Star Trek got backlash because the execs, on seeing that a lot of fans were raging against the inconsistencies in their unpopular Star Trek show and viewership were down to the point where the show was being cancelled, decided that "You know what, if the events in the show are this unpopular let's make it ambigous if they never happened in the first place" which enraged a *different* clique of fans. Kawamori going "There is no canon. Even my own material is not "canon". There's a broad strokes timeline of events and a set of characters who may or may not have been involved in those events, but that's all we're willing to say is factual" (or words to that effect) may be hugely frustrating to Star Wars style fans who need everything to line up, but it's a massive boon to fanfiction writers who can basically say "Kawamori doesn't pay attention to canon so why should *I*, so event X that you're all worrying about didn't go down *either* way shown on screen, it went down *my* way." I just wish more fanfiction authors would take advantage in English, because there's really nowhere near the amount of fanfiction available for this setting as it deserves, IMO.
  24. SebastianP
    So much this. Trying to find the "real story" is an exercise in futility because everything is subject to change, even the stuff written currently in the Chronicle can be thrown out if Kawamori decides to write something set earlier in the timeline again, and introduce new mecha in the process. Like what happened with Macross Zero, which conflicted with a bunch of previously established lore and introduced the VF-0, which had to be given *that* particular non-sensical designation for reasons. Best answer to whether something is actually true is "does multiple sources agree on it"? So, we can say Frontier fought Galaxy and the Vajra in 2059, and landed on the Vajra planet after exhausting their resources, because all the sources agree. Sheryl and Ranka definitely exist, they're referenced as inspirations for the characters in both versions of Delta. The statuses of Sheryl, Alto and Michael? Take your pick, because this is one where the sources definitely disagree... (Though it feels like Michael has more evidence supporting his survival than not, given that he lives through the movies, that Labyrinth of Time directly follows the movies, and he lives in Macross 30, in which the characters appear to come from a post-Vajra War timeline in which somehow everyone survived and are well. ) So yeah, broad strokes. An alien starship crashed in 1999. There was a war in the 00s between people who wanted a unified government and people that didn't. The Zentraedi showed up and bombarded earth into a wasteland, and were defeated by the crew of the rebuilt alien starship and the civilians they'd rescued. Hikaru and Misa were heroes of the war, Kakizaki and Focker both existed and both died. Did the SDF really dock with the Daedalus and Prometheus though? We'll never know because the versions don't agree with each other. There was an incident involving Sharon Apple and a pair of hot blooded fighter jocks flying prototype machines in the early 2040s. Did it *actually* involve mind-controlling people to the point where they managed to launch the *Macross*? Normally I'd go "what are you smoking" if someone tried to tell me that thing was in any shape to fly after 30 years in a lake being used as an ornament. Fire Bomber became very popular in the 2040s. Whether they actually had any of the adventures from Macross 7 in the real timeline, or flew VFs with musical instruments for controls? Your guess is as good as mine. Galaxy and Frontier both entered Vajra space and go their asses kicked by the Vajra until communications were established in 2059, Galaxy was destroyed in the process. Ranka made a name for herself. Frontier settled on the Vajra home planet. All agreed on in both versions and referenced in later material. Is Sheryl still sick? No idea. Is Alto missing? No idea. Did Michael die? No idea. Given that official material exists that go both ways *and* there's what appears to be a "golden ending" referenced in Macross 30? Make up your own story. (Hell, aside from Sheryl and Ranka, who are named in Delta, do we even know if there was an Alto or a Michael at all...?) And the reason all this ambiguity is a *good* thing is because Kawamori is not constrained by having to tell the same story twice, and can surprise us with some pretty choice twists. Like how, because watchers of the Frontier TV series knew that Michael died in it, they were able to fake us out with his apparent death in both movies and still have him alive at the end of it. Likewise the other fate-alterations from the second movie. To paraphrase Ramba Ral: These are no compilation movies! No compilation movies!
  25. SebastianP
    This week's image is up: Queadol Magdomilla looks ok, but the Nupetiet Vergnitz variants look way too skinny in the top view to me, and the less said about the abomination that is the Queadol/Gun Destroyer hybrid the better IMO. (Huh, the artist is aware of the issue with the width of the ships. Doesn't say if it was deliberate, but he knows they're narrower). The captions for the two N-V versions say "Large Fleet Command Battleship" and "Large Gunboat" according to Google Lens. Since both the Q-M and N-V versions were on this sheet, if there are any more Macross illustrations after this they'll be entirely new to me. Possibly an "everything on one chart" size comparion?
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