Shades of Macross 7 in Robotech's future?

[1st Border Red Devil]

Ok,

I recently got The Art of Shadow Chronicles which has a short blurb on the Ark Angel-class Colony Fortresses. They are basically long endurance, heavily armed colony starships. The idea being that the older Angel-class Colony Ships (which used the Spacefold/Reaction Engine Booster of the Neutron-S Missiles) were either underarmed or unarmed totally and some had fallen prey to Space Pirates, Rogue Zentraedi or other menaces. The older ships were therefore deemed unsuitable and their use was discontinued (I'm guessing sometime before the Invid Invasion).

Armament

x40(?) tri-barreled anti-ship beam cannon turrets

x1 Synchro-cannon mounted in the bow

~ 1000(?) fighter mecha (balanced between 3 Battloid Launch Hangars and numerous C/VSTOL bays/landing pads)

While it is true that Macross 7 owes as much of its storyline to SDF Macross, which in turn could be said to be inspired by Battlestar Galactica, they are all (in one way or another) basically a retelling of both Homer's The Odyssey and Virgil's The Aeneid. All in all, thats not necessarily a bad thing, but I have this sneaking suspicion that the UES Ark Angel will be leading a colony fleet of humans from Earth (trying to escape both the damaged planet and their REF 'overlords') on a long distance exploration/colonization mission into the galaxy well beyond the periphery of UEEF colonized space. Given that Shadow Chronicles came off as a bad Star Trek episode anyway, I just have this bad feeling that either Shadow Rising or a spin-off anime (maybe a comic book series) will simply be Robotech meets Macross 7.

There is nothing wrong with a series telling of colonization, but why the addition of a big Macross-style gun on a freakin colony ship? Why have lots of armaments and mecha? If the galaxy is THAT hostile, a fleet of warships would have to accompany any colonization mission and it would be required to be a one way trip. While its fairly certain tha the Ark Angel-class cannot transform, its still bothersome to me.

[jenius]

Big spaceships with big guns are pretty much an industry standard. I'm not really sure to go with a response to your rant but isn't the obvious continuation of The Shadow Chronicles to have the Ark Angel cruising the galaxy on a two year (or was it one year) mission to find Rick Hunter and restore humanity to a super power? A big armed spaceship cruising the galaxy looking for something... you can't say it's not a tried and true plot but originality was never Robotech's strong point.

[terry the lone wolf]

As long as there's no Basara no big whup!

[Morpheus]

A 2.570 km colony ship and only crewed by 8.500 people?

However I like the design

[1st Border Red Devil]

A 2.570 km colony ship and only crewed by 8.500 people?

Yea, it can hold upwards of 750k colonists and presumably enough supplies, vehicles and so forth to have a sustainable colony. I would have lowered the colonists to 250k at the least, considering a long range colony may have to be on its own for the better part of a decade or more (if not cut off altogether) due to the supposed hostile nature of warfare in the post-Tirolian Empire galaxies.

[Duke Togo]

LISTEN TO MY SONG!

Stage fright, go away

This is my big day...

[chrono]

There is nothing wrong with a series telling of colonization, but why the addition of a big Macross-style gun on a freakin colony ship? Why have lots of armaments and mecha? If the galaxy is THAT hostile, a fleet of warships would have to accompany any colonization mission and it would be required to be a one way trip. While its fairly certain tha the Ark Angel-class cannot transform, its still bothersome to me.

It's just reinforcing what many people think of HG. So I say let'em continue to hang themselves!

[Radd]

I'm glad they're sticking to the MOSPEADA style ships, though on the other hand I wish they were a bit more creative with them. There's more room to expand within the MOSPEADA design elements than they seem to acknowledge, and so all the ship designs just look like fanfic retreads of existing designs rather than full evolutions or other classes within the fleet.

I also kinda wish they'd drop the "shadow" motif. I wouldn't think their cloaking technology would be so dependent on the hull being painted purple, orange, and dark blue. The "shadow" enabled fleet at the end of Robotech was something special, as neither of the previous two fleets used those colours (unless I'm misremembering?).

I don't know, maybe I'm being overly critical. I suppose it's just that I really liked the the MOSPEADA ship designs, but all the new stuff just seems less and less interesting to me. Like they're reusing the same basic design ideas but not really going anywhere with them. This colony ship looks like they cross the SDF-1 with the big battleship from the end of Invid Invasion (I believe they were calling that the SDF-7 last I heard?).

[1st Border Red Devil]

This colony ship looks like they cross the SDF-1 with the big battleship from the end of Invid Invasion (I believe they were calling that the SDF-7 last I heard?).

No, SDF-04. That was from the actual Robotech Tv series. The Sentinels materials indicates the SDF-05 series were the Ikazuchi's, the SDF-06 series were the Garfish and the SDF-07s were the Horizonts.

[Keith]

This whole Shadow technology thing reeks of the hinted at 3rd season of Exo-Squad. Exo-Fleet adapts cloaking technology to fight off one enemy, then the originators of that technology come back & render its use moot, and bitch slap them at the same time. Hmm...

[lord_breetai]

This whole Shadow technology thing reeks of the hinted at 3rd season of Exo-Squad. Exo-Fleet adapts cloaking technology to fight off one enemy, then the originators of that technology come back & render its use moot, and bitch slap them at the same time. Hmm...

Well there was the rumors that the 3rd Season of Exosquad was linked to Robotech because of the Exosquad Robotech toyline, and that the Invid would show up in it.