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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.

But...thinking caps were from THE NOVELS! You're a dirty McKinny-ist!

I need to quit accidentally hitting back and/or refresh. Especially when I'm nerding out hardcore. Anyways, let's see what I can dredge back up... The 100% reaction was an assumption for math's sake(in an atmosphere it's a likely end result, but I've got no idea if it'd be fast enough to actually contribute to the bomb yield). I can't think of a way to guarantee it happening without overtechnology. But if you wrap the bomb core in a barrier sphere, then use it to crush the fuel and antifuel together... Or initiate a gravity pulse that collapses the entire bomb into a singularity(I wonder if that'd actually work...)* Using conventional tech... you're limited to encouraging things with construction. Maybe put the antimatter bottle in the center, and surround it with a matter shell, then use explosives to crush the whole mess. Sort of like a fission bomb with a juicy core of destructive goodness. If you get the shell moving with enough momenteum... But even assuming massively worse blowoff for an antimatter weapon, you can STILL get a similar detonation in a far smaller load than a conventional fission or fusion weapon. Let's say that you have a hundred times worse blowoff than Gadget and Fat Man, which got yield out of roughly 1/6th of their nuclear material. (Dated example, sure. But I dunno what sort of efficiency more modern designs get).So only 1/600th of an antimater bomb will actually react in time to be part of the bomb blast. So to duplicate the blast from 6 kg of plutonium, you need... 600 grams of fuel. 300 grams of antimatter and an equal part of normal matter. Still less than a kilogram of masstotal. *Tangentally, I wonder how effective a microsingularity would be as a weapon... they decay fast and, as I understand it, they release a lot of energy when they fall below the threshold to remain a singularity. A search for pair-annihilation turns up scientific articles about antiparticle reactions, so it's apparently a legitimate scientific term. That and it only really makes sense that way. Neither fission nor fusion involve annihilation(particle-antiparticle reactions are the only things I can think of that truly annihilate anything), and very rarely involve pairs(He3+He3 fusion being a notable exception). Pair-annihilation is really too specific to cover conventional nuclear reactions.

As I understand things, it DID carry over to Sigma. Unlocked from the beginning, even. So no guilt trip to unlock it. Also no Ayane title screen to let everyone know you were a giant sissy. In the interests of full disclosure, I should state that I beat Black on Ninja Dog mode. I could probably do a normal run now, but I keep getting distracted by other stuff. And my XBox1 has issues now, which complicates things. The DVD drive had a mechanical failure. How am I supposed to get my Gunvalkyrie fix NOW?

AGAIN? Screw it. If the browser insists on eating posts, I'm going to take it as a sign that I'm spending too much time on this. The cat girls are spared... today.

I would assume he's been pursuing channels within the company since DOA4's completion, and the company president's "FU" is a new development. That or he's been developing a paper trail to strengthen his case for the lawsuit. Filing immediately isn't always the best course of action.

The easiest way to bring that in-line with the rest of the continuity is to consider that one of the technologies being tested on the VF-0. And once it was established as sound, with clear advantages over the existing VF-1 cockpit, they began introducing it into the VF-1 lines. While it's not clear when the Block 6 design was introduced, it isn't a huge concern. Most of the VFs we see in the TV series are from the earlier runs. The Macross didn't have access to the Earth's assembly lines after it left, and the ship's limited resources could be better spent in areas other than VF cockpit upgrades and pilot retraining. Most of the Valks still on Earth were destroyed in the final Zentradi assault, limiting the appearance of later blocks in the post-war arc. Certainly, replacements would be built over the two years between the final battle and the post-awr arc, but it makes sense* to assign them to new pilots and leave the veterans with their old planes. Hence, Hikaru is always in the repaired Skull-1, with it's first-gen cockpit, for the post-war arc. And he's the one we see the most of. *Both from a rebuilding standpoint(a replacement plane isn't expanding the force) and a training standpoint(the guys that survived SW1 are intimately familiar with the old cockpit, so put the new guys in Block 6 planes and don't waste time retraining the old-timers until much later).

*twitch* I had something typed up. Then accidentally deleted it. Hypothetically, antimatter reactions are the most efficient you can get. An optimal antimatter reaction is pure E=mc2, while fission and fusion reactions leave most of the mass behind in the form of the reaction's end products. Antimatter's just a pain to work with(as well as produce). The wording of the reaction weapon article seems to imply the term's usage changed as time went on and technology advanced("By 2045, the term ..."). Which explains the different approaches to reaction weaponry in the original series(reaction missiles are thrown around like candy in the first episode) and Plus/7(one makes explicit mention of the political problems with reaction weapons, the other shows the difficult authorization requirements to drop one on a planet inhabited solely by the single greatest threat known to galactic civilization). The change in technology would also explain why a reaction weapon trumps the Battle 7's cannon. I was a bit skeptical that even an overtech-boosted fusion bomb would trump the absurd power output seen in Macross-class cannons. But if it's antimatter... you're getting the full E=mc2 out of every atom that reacts. And lacking an explanation for how a super-dimension energy cannon works... matter annihilation retains it's position as #1. It's interesting to note that antimatter weapons are much dirtier than fusion weapons, though. The intense gamma ray burst, as I understand things, is enough to disrupt atomic nuclei, causing stable isotopes to become radioactive ones. Fusion, by comparison, can be quite clean if you use the right reactions. It doesn't release near as many gamma rays, and it's possible to choose a reaction with no neutron emissions, making for a much cleaner weapon(or generator). Footnote: Just for fun, I looked the numbers up. A gram of matter(roughjly equivalent to a dollar bill), if wholly converted to energy(as in a "perfect" antimatter reaction) would release energy equivalent to roughly 21 kilotons of TNT. Coincidentally, that's ALSO the yield on the Trinity and Nagasaki explosions, where an estimated kilogram of plutonium underwent fission(with the rest of it being blown free before the chain reaction could propagate into it).