JB0

I was just thinking that if Hikaru is 101, and Max and Kakizaki are 102 and 103... that means either the numbers aren't based on replaced planes, or that EVERYONE in Skull quit dying when Hikaru signed up until Kakizaki started pulling them back down. But yeah, you're right that most Valk pilots are getting raped left and right. They do point that a few times in the show that the promotions are pretty iffy. When Hikaru makes a comment about how green his new wingmen are, Focker's quick to knock him back into line by pointing out that he isn't that much more experienced than they are. And after the whole team gets promoted(if I recall, it's right after the Cat's Eye mission), they comment that they're getting promoted absurdly fast. Sort of "Hey, you aren't dead yet? Here, have another rank." Everyone knows they aren't being promoted on the basis of skill and experience, but because there's empty fighters that need filling. Kakizaki's not without talent(in the simulators he ranked as well as Max did). He's just unpolished, overconfident, and overexcitable. I honestly thought the contrast between Max and Kakizaki was interesting. It's somewhat ironic that when he dies, he's actually starting to shape up into a decent pilot. If you compare his first appearances to his performance in Burst Point, it's almost like he's a different person. Burst Point also features the only non-title-sequence use of the Badass Shades switch on Hikaru's helmet(well, maybe Phantasm, but that's using the title animation anyways), so it's worth watching for that alone. ... What? I can't be the only person that thought that looked insanely awesome.

I'd always just assumed it had to do with the old UN being nuked into obliviion by the zentradi. Hence Global's government is the New UN. It just never came up before somehow.

Wouldn't be the first time. HG registered a DYRL URL a while back. Fueled a bit of rumor for a while. All that ever came out of it was a few busts, if I remember right.

It's also possible that the number has very little to do with rank or squadron position. It may just be based on how many planes the squadron's gone through. ... Which would mean they were getting their butts kicked royally before Hikaru signed up. Never mind.

How would that work? No one knew Sharon was a danger except the guys behind the Ghost and the mad scientist behind Sharon. Neither one was interested in sharing. And once Sharon went crazy, no one was in any shape to tell anyone anything. Except Myung, and she was busy trying to escape from the crazy robot.

Could be. Focker is a seasoned veteran. He was an ace during the Unification Wars. Hikaru and company are raw recruits. They didn't even sign up until after the Macross launched.

Ah, yeah... I have a loose thumb. But it's not really consistent. The snap-out "laser guns" were hard to open the first time(and undocumented!). WAs one of those things.... I was sure the missile launchers would slide forward, but not entirely sure why. Then the guns snapped out, and I was "cool!". Then I realized there was no detail, and they were just dangly plastic prongs, and I was like "this is lame." Then I slid the missile launchers back into place and closed everything up. ... And then the right thumb fell out.

My MalWart only had Ratchet and Blackarachnia. My Toys R Us had piles of stuff. I grabbed Starscream. Yah. He's got a few breakaways that are entirely too loose. The back fins on mine pop off quite readily too(and given the VF-19 cues in the design, I was disappointed to see them fold into back fins instead of popping out to become a shield). On top of that, getting his arms in place for the transformation back to jetplane is a bit fidgety. Which is fairly embarassing, given there's no attempt at concealing the limbs to justify the fidget(he'd look a lot nicer from the jet's side if the shoulder pads faced out instead of in). But it's okay, because he's Starscream. And Starscream shall always reign supreme.

Mostly, I've thought the movie flows far better. The OVA loses me at a few key points. The live-fire "accident" makes no sense. It's entirely too contrived, and there's simply no way it works. The story is better without it, no matter how fun the fight is. Especially as it taints a large portion of the OVA. Isamu backing down when Guld jumps on him for not coming to Myung's rescue is totally out of character. He WAS there, even if he was late. He risked his life to get there. There's simply no way he'd let Guld crap all over him for a bit of bad traffic. But it DOES make sense for him to back down if he was too busy banging Lucy to get out of bed. Guld's comment hurts him because he knows it's true. He's failed Myung when it really counted. Lucy apologizing for not telling him Myung was leaving makes no sense in the OVA, as there's no real indication their relationship WENT anywhere. There's no reason for her to be TAKING his calls. Again, sex makes everything better. The first time I saw the movie, I thought that it was how they should've done things in the first place. Then I found out it was what they'd originally planned, and it all made sense.

Personally? I've always suspected Millard leaked the Ghost unveiling to Isamu, knowing that he wouldn't let it stand at that. Sharon Apple is a coincidence that manages to keep Isamu out of the slammer.

http://macross.anime.net/mecha/united_nations/index.html Scroll down to the heirarchy section. In the TV series, you're only introduced to Hikaru's team and Focker, the group commander. The rest of the group is anonymous. After his first promotion, Hikaru is leader of Vermilion team, with Max and Kaikizaki as his subordinates. Presumably some of the brownies we see are the other Skulls. the numbering in DYRL is presumably carried over from the TV series numbering.

I'm doing my part! *leaps onto a rampaging bug and dies*

I had the same idea. Guitar Hero, Rock Band, Guitarmania, whatever. It's perfect any way you slice it. Rock Band, of course, wins. If you can convince some friends that playing Fire Bomber is a good way to spend an evening(and if they release a keyboard so someone can be Ray, then extra-win).

In space, no one can hear you scream 'radioactive fire in the hole'

You make an excellent case. I lay the issue to rest, convinced there's some logic in it. But SDF never presented them as an escalation. Except possibly for the last battle, but there's arguably good reasons for not blasting Bodol's fortress with the cannon. It was so large that it could be hard to guarantee you hit something important, or that you did enough damage to shut it down. In such a case, a lot of little attacks make a lot more sense than one big one.

But in Mac7, reaction weapons were clearly intended to be an increase in firepower. They blasted the big bulldog thing with the Battle 7's cannon, after determining that they couldn't nail it with fighter-based weaponry. It blocks it completely. So they called home for reaction weapon authorization. And Operation Stargazer required the delivery of a SINGLE reaction warhead to the cave. It was awesome, don't get me wrong. But it never made a whole lot of SENSE. That's the major thing that bothers me. They're certainly far easier to deploy, especially if you need more than one shot. Shaped charge nuclear/antimatter... oh, the possibilities... *drools*

Hmmm... I'd always wondered what the yield on that was. I knew it was obscene, and led to my questioning that the deployment of reaction weapons in Macross 7 would actually be an ESCALATION after the cannon failure. Of course, that was based on the assumption that the Battle 7's cannon is similar in output. The Macross' cannon could function as more of a catalyst than a standard cannon. Rather than focusing internally-generated energy into a beam and directing it outward, it could tap into another dimension and pull energy from that dimension into our own, then focus and direct THAT energy. It's implied(but not stated) that the barrier system works on a similar principle. And we know the protoculture used an organic form of such technology to power the EVIL series(with disastrous results), as well as that a ship in a fold exists in "super dimension space" instead of our own universe. That may be what they mean by a super-dimension-energy cannon. It's a clever way to work around the laws of thermodynamics, as well. You can't get out more than you put in... UNLESS you're stealing it from another dimension, thus maintaining a net balance! But it puts us back at square one with the Mac7 paradox. Assuming the Battle 7's cannon is similar to the SDF-1's, how the hell is reaction weaponry (of either flavor) an escalation? You'd need literally TONS of antimatter to generate a similar energy yield. And a bomb that massive simply won't be deliverable. I know just enough to be dangerous. And I'm looking things up as I go(Which makes some of these posts take a long time. I start typing, run to check something, then get an idea, do a bit of research, then come back later.) Math was never my strong point, really. And working that out would be a lot of math. I know the general idea, though. We can determine from the animation that it vaporized a large chunk of rock sitting directly in front of the ship. And that it boiled a VERY large mass of water on it's way out. You can calculate the mass of the rock and water, and use the heat required to vaporize those as a lower limit(which is guaranteed to be lower than the actual energy output due to EM radiation(if nothing else, there's a lot of visible light emission) air, and the zentradi ship that got vaped). I also know that the Macross' cannon gets a benefit that bombs don't get. All the energy is released onto a small area, instead of spread out evenly in all directions around the weapon. Since the surface area of a sphere increases so rapidly with the sphere's diameter, a bomb rapidly loses force with distance. The surface area of a cylinder's end, of course, stays constant with cylinder length(if the Macross' beam was spreading, it was very slowly). So for a given energy output, the cannon will always do more damage to a given target than the bomb. Especially as distance increases. Not really relevant to Operation Stargazer, since the bomb was sent into an enclosed area. But in general the gun is better for a given energy level. To take a more practical example than nuclear detonations and mountain vaporization... If you put a few grams of gunpowder in a pile and light it, you won't do a whole lot of damage to anyone from any real distance. But take the exact same mass of gunpowder, confine and focus it so all the energy is directed into a single path, and you can kill someone rather easily at a significant range.

Hikaru got dropped in a 1J from the very start in the TV series, though. My theory? The 1J was a "hero" mech. It's main purpose, IRL, was to give Hikaru a different mech than everyone else. It was, in short, a Gundam. With Macross being an established franchise when they did DYRL, they didn't HAVE to put the hero in a unique mech just for the sake of being like Gundam. So he flew a 1A like everyone else. And the 1S stuck around in spite of that because it was badass.

I prefer the movie. It's a tighter, more coherent version of the story. Though the OVA certainly has it's share of awesome in it. I'd really prefer an "extended movie" that combined the best of the OVA and the movie, but... of the current choices, I'll take the movie. Damn shame there's not a DECENT US version available.

For real?!?! If that one gets significant screen time... I dunno what I'll do... Aside from celebrate.

I used to have a full set of RT novels myself. And End of the Circle WAS bad. Was just going with the joke and using the kind of flame that post would generate in a Robotech-oriented forum. (from what I recall, the RT people have always been strongly divided along animation VS novelization lines. Sorta like us and Macross 7, just with a more even mix and loud people on both sides)

Aren't the power plants still labelled thermonuclear? (I'd stick with fusion powerplants anyways personally, even if all the technical hurdles were overcome. It's just so much safer when you don't need a tank of antimatter lying around. But that's just me.) Either way... Using overtechnology/anime magic, I can think of ways to make an antimatter reactor vastly more effective. Less extreme gravity manipulation than you'd need for a weapon could weight things in your favor. Using antiparticles or anti-ions instead of electrically neutral antimatter makes manipulation easier, as well as making the fuel and antifuel naturally attracted to each other. Or you could just flood the core with an excess of normal matter to ensure the antimatter had a target. Since antimatter will naturally react, maintaining carefully controlled conditions isn't necessary. You can just flood the core with gas and let nature take it's course. Especially if you're using charged fuel instead of neutral fuel. A 100% reaction is inevitable in those conditions(or so close to 100 that it doesn't really matter). The biggest concern is making sure it reacts with FUEL instead of the reactor vessel. And even if only half of the energy released by an antimatter reaction can be harnessed, you're still getting vastly more energy released than you would from a fusion reaction(fission and fusion reactions both use E=mc^2 for their energy, they just have a lot less matter undergoing the conversion to energy). So arguably, an antimatter reactor would be more efficient by default.

^ | What he said. If you're already watching it, it's kinda too late anyways. But I think DYRL makes a LOT more sense if you've seen the TV series. It jumps right into the middle of things, and skips most of the character development and background information in favor of more hot mech-on-mech action. Not that this is a BAD thing, but I think it benefits a lot from prior knowledge of the series.

I STRONGLY recommend watching the original SDF Macross TV series. It's the basic groundwork for everything that's come since. It's also a damn nice series, animation consistency excepted. I mean, when you can say a show has an interesting CLIP EPISODE... they obviously did SOMETHING right.

I tend to be fairly adaptable in my controls. I didn't even have a real issue with the stick-click boost system. The only thing that really bugged me was the more elaborate platforming segments. And that's me more than it. I have a lot of trouble with 3D platforming in general. I always misjudge the distance.