Macross TV question

[Vinny]

I think I missed something in the first episode. When the Zentraldi arrive and battle the two spaceships (ARMS 1 and 2, were they?), the head honch Zentraldi guy (I suck with names, but I'll learn them again) says something about how they are fighting in the old style. What does he mean? At first I thought it was because the ARMS ships were shooting missles, but then I saw them shoot missles, too. Then I thought it was because the ships dodged the Zentraldi beams, as that was the point I think the Zentraldi guy said it. Could anyone clear this up for me? I remember (I'm watching the series again) that the Zentraldi do things differently then humans (like don't repair stuff), but I can't figure out what he was referring to with the above.

[Hurin]

I don't think it's supposed to be readily apparent to us. . . for two reasons:

1. They just wanted to get the point across that we appear primitive (at least in warfare) to the Zentraedi.

2. From our perspective (as humans), watching us fight the Zentraedi doesn't look primitive or lame. . . but from the Zentraedi perspective, just the fact that they do obliterate the ARMDs and the rest of the fleet despite our best efforts demonstrates a total lack of space-warfare sophistication on humanity's part.

In other words, as a master tactition, he's noticing nuances of our tactics that aren't visible to us at all because we are both ignorant of such nuances and oblivious to how space-warfare should be done in the Zentraedi rule book.

And, of course, we didn't see everything that was happening during that battle. He may have been referring to stuff not actually shown on screen.

H

[ewilen]

I think you're referring to Britai and Exedore's reaction to the Earth forces' nuclear missiles. In Robotech, it's implied that they're noting how primitive the missiles are. In Macross, they are actually surprised by the "reaction weaponry" of the missiles (i.e., nukes under a different name to avoid offending the audience's sensibilities), since "reaction weaponry" is an ancient, lost secret.

See http://macross.anime.net/fallacies/errata/...robotech_faq/5/

Also, these Usenet threads hopefully provide some clarification...

Thread #1

Thread #2

Edited September 26, 2003 by ewilen

[Batou]

I think you're referring to Britai and Exedore's reaction to the Earth forces' nuclear missiles. In Robotech, it's implied that they're noting how primitive the missiles are. In Macross, they are actually surprised by the "reaction weaponry" of the missiles (i.e., nukes under a different name to avoid offending the audience's sensibilities), since "reaction weaponry" is an ancient, lost secret.

See http://macross.anime.net/fallacies/errata/...robotech_faq/5/

Also, these Usenet threads hopefully provide some clarification...

Thread #1

Thread #2

I think you nailed it. I think they were unimpressed with humanity's lack of planning against orbital bombardment in regards to how we all clump together in cities - very easy to kill us all. We seemed to just put up structures haphazardly on the surface without any thought as to whether giant spaceships above us might rain down death at any moment. Which is true - it probably just never occurred to a clone living in space his entire life that we'd never been involved in an intersteller war or even knew the tactics employed in them.

From what I remember (and I haven't watched the TV series, so I may be way off), Britai and Exedol were pretty shocked when the UN Spacy forces tossed a few nukes at them and promptly took out a few of their capital ships. "Reaction" weaponry was a long lost technology as far as the Zentradi were concerned, buried deep in their past.

Wasn't this one of the reasons they wanted to take the Macross whole without destroying it in the first place? They knew that humans had the technology to 1.) repair and restore the Macross, something that had eluded them for aeons, and 2.) we had nukes - something they had lost to time (or maybe never had - maybe not trusted by the Protoculture to wield them responsibly). Nukes definitely would have helped them against the Supervision Army, and any military wouldn't jump at the chance for a new uber-weapon to use against their arch rival?

Edited September 26, 2003 by Batou

[Vinny]

Ah so it did have to do with the missles, but it was about them being nukes. Thanks for clearing that up And also thanks for pointing out nukes are called reactor missles in the Macross world. I was reading the Macross history over at Macross Compendium and they kept saying reactor weapons and it confused me

I'll use this thread if I get confused anymore through out the show. I just finished the episode where Hikaru and Minmei are trapped in the engine room or whatever place it is. I love Hikaru's space suit. "I'll just reinforce my flight suit to be usable in space by tightly wrapping cloth around it!!"

Edited September 27, 2003 by Vinny

[JB0]

Of course, the Zentradi had good reason to be somewhat underwhelmed by our forces.

Our ships were TINY, we hadn't even figured out beam weaponry yet, Britai's fleet was larger than our ENTIRE space force, and the vast majority of our infrastructure was just sloppy(under the zentradi assumption that everyone's a soldier and everything's a military facility).

Us knowing how to repair ships and build nukes was just shocking to them.

I mean, they were the mightiest force in the galaxy and they couldn't do it. And we were just a bunch of redneck hicks that hadn't even made a single hyperspace flight yet. Hell, we didn't even have an active colony on Mars.

As I recall, they were initially thinking we'd found some prototype Supervision Army vessel, because we were so low-tech we had no business repairing a ship, much less redesigning it.