No Love for Southern Cross?

[DewPoint]

So what about the "Ace pilot", in the brightly colored custom military whatever, bringing terror to the enemy and destroying their morale?  Does it work in reality?  Red Barron like?

[Seto Kaiba]

3 hours ago, DewPoint said:

So what about the "Ace pilot", in the brightly colored custom military whatever, bringing terror to the enemy and destroying their morale?  Does it work in reality?  Red Barron like?

To an extent.

The brightly colored "Ace custom" paint jobs are largely a thing of the past, having mostly been used by the Germans in both world wars and the Japanese in the second world war. The US Navy does have certain brightly colored aircraft even in this era of low observable stealth, though those units are typically reserved for the commander of the air group on a given carrier. It's not so much a ace pilot thing there as a mark of status for the pilot with the most seniority. Low observable stealth kind of ruined that. Brightly colored squadron markings were at least a thing prior to that point, though individual ace paint jobs were not.

You see this reflected in fiction in a similar manner. The protagonists tend to not have the custom paint jobs, or when they do they're more subdued than the flamboyant paint jobs used by the enemy aces. Char Aznable's signature red mobile suits being perhaps the most iconic example... as well as what Southern Cross was blatantly ripping off.

There was, briefly, something like a modern example of a pilot becoming feared on the basis of their reputation. That would be the so-called "Ghost of Kyiv", though that pilot ultimately turned out to be an urban legend based on conflating the exploits of several different pilots and outright exaggeration rather than an actual person. Before that was revealed to be a mythical person, it hearkened back to a rather more dramatic era when high achievers on the battlefield would find themselves saddled with the occasional outlandish title. The closest we get in the modern day is particularly units that have a fearsome collective reputation like Delta Force, Seal Team Six, The US Army's first infantry division, the Jolly Rogers, Black Aces, and the like.

[Big s]

4 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Granted, Southern Cross is a mockbuster whose writers never bothered to come up with justifications for 90% of what goes on in its story or design works...

Even so, Liberte and Glorie's armed forces supposedly descend from modern military traditions... and let's just say that the idea of requiring your military's leaders to make obvious targets of themselves by wearing the fanciest hat and/or blingiest uniform on the battlefield was, coincidentally I'm sure, started to go out of fashion in the mid-19th century right around the time rifled muskets brought an end to Napoleonic tactics with their substantially better accuracy at range.  Wearing a "shoot me, I'm an officer" sign on your bonce was determined to be a pretty poor life choice almost three centuries before the series is set and I can't honestly imagine why anyone would question that wisdom.  

It’s sci fi and anime no less. It’s basically the same thing I was saying about the safety issue. It might not be a modern thing, but as far as anime and such, Gundam has ornaments of all kind on mecha and leaders. Even Macross has some wild coloring. The movie had some with gold bling on the enemies and shoot at me please red stripes and a red spot to let the enemy know exactly where the pilot sits. Southern Cross isn’t even a serious show. I don’t think reality should be expected anyway.

The bling for southern cross is probably just a status thing since before the zor, they weren’t fighting anyone. It seems like an ornamentation of a bored military and it looked neat. If the modern military gave you a storm trooper style armor and there were no competing nations to actually fight, I think more people would think about joining.

[CoryHolmes]

I've always excused the blingy armours as a direct reaction to the Rain of Death.  These people have taken on the roles of knights in shining armour, a symbol for the citizenry that law and order have returned.

Does it make sense?  Engh, kinda not really.  But it's enough for me 😊

[Seto Kaiba]

9 hours ago, Big s said:

It’s sci fi and anime no less. It’s basically the same thing I was saying about the safety issue. It might not be a modern thing, but as far as anime and such, Gundam has ornaments of all kind on mecha and leaders. Even Macross has some wild coloring. The movie had some with gold bling on the enemies and shoot at me please red stripes and a red spot to let the enemy know exactly where the pilot sits.

Bright colors on a giant robot are kind of forgivable... because no amount of low-viz gray is going to hide an armored fighting vehicle that's at least as tall as a two-story house if not bigger.  Even more so if it's being used in space, where realistically that paintjob wouldn't be visibly 99% of the time and the craft would only be identifiable by running lights or any illumination sources built into it.  Not to mention if EVERY member of a unit has a wild paintjob, there's no easy way to pick out the leader.

Gundam is often pointed to as an example of pointless ornimentation, but for the most part it only goes as far as bright colors on prototypes or ace units... which are justified for practical or propaganda reasons.  (Prototypes are sometimes painted bright colors to make them easier to track by eye during testing.)  There are occasional moments of non-functional bling, but they're nowhere near as common as folks make out and tend to be applied to whole units rather than individual officers (e.g. the gold trim on all the Sleeves MS's). 

 

9 hours ago, Big s said:

Southern Cross isn’t even a serious show. I don’t think reality should be expected anyway.

Southern Cross was absolutely trying to be a (mostly) serious sci-fi/mecha anime like Gundam or Macross.

It comes off as somewhat less so because it was cancelled with barely half the story in the can, and because its protagonist is such a ****ing moron thanks to the writers trying to write a compelling female character and getting no farther than "marriage is a woman's happiness" that they were borderline trying to replace her with a man before the series was cancelled.

 

 

9 hours ago, Big s said:

The bling for southern cross is probably just a status thing since before the zor, they weren’t fighting anyone. It seems like an ornamentation of a bored military and it looked neat. If the modern military gave you a storm trooper style armor and there were no competing nations to actually fight, I think more people would think about joining.

If there were no other nations to actually fight, the military would probably be abolished as a massive waste of taxpayer money.

Why there's still a military in a post-apocalyptic world where wars played a major role in rendering Earth so uninhabitable that humanity had to abandon it and there aren't any rival governments is one of the major plot holes in the Southern Cross series concept that its lazy creators never bothered to fill.

 

9 hours ago, CoryHolmes said:

I've always excused the blingy armours as a direct reaction to the Rain of Death.  These people have taken on the roles of knights in shining armour, a symbol for the citizenry that law and order have returned.

Does it make sense?  Engh, kinda not really.  But it's enough for me 😊

Definitely not, lol.

No such event occurred in Southern Cross... and in the Robotech version's official setting, the Southern Cross Army was a death-of-career posting where the Earth Forces dumped the real military's rejects, washouts, etc. that the military felt would be least missed in an actual battle.  Not the sort of force that society would consider knights in shining armor.  Perhaps "Turds in a tin can", given that their equipment is also explicitly poor-quality junk for which development was motivated by spite (and corruption) in Robotech's official setting.  They're far more Delta Farce than Band of Brothers... esp. since Robotech took the Army's leader from a curt and officious but generally reasonable commander to being an incompetent megalomaniacal jerk and xenophobe.

TL;DR: Robotech Southern Cross Army gets NO respect in canon.

[Big s]

34 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

If there were no other nations to actually fight, the military would probably be abolished as a massive waste of taxpayer money.

Why there's still a military in a post-apocalyptic world where wars played a major role in rendering Earth so uninhabitable that humanity had to abandon it and there aren't any rival governments is one of the major plot holes in the Southern Cross series concept that its lazy creators never bothered to fill.

I still think it’s a bored military. There’s probably no taxes to worry, just people serving for the most part. I know they make a wage, but they never got into all the politics or economics. The

need for a military may not exist, but the need to be ready just in case does. Either for non connected humans finding the planet to have resources or troubles from within. 
just the other day there was a massive breakout of violence at several movie theaters around the U.S. just because it was a four dollar movie day. If people are stuck on a planet and tired of meaningless labor, they’re gonna eventually cause problems. If the government tries to keep a slight bit of discipline, they government may feel that’s enough to at least keep the people from rioting. And giving people a status symbol may be their thinking of making the people believe they’re serving a greater purpose, even if it’s just for useless bling.

49 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Gundam is often pointed to as an example of pointless ornimentation, but for the most part it only goes as far as bright colors on prototypes or ace units... which are justified for practical or propaganda reasons.  (Prototypes are sometimes painted bright colors to make them easier to track by eye during testing.)  There are occasional moments of non-functional bling, but they're nowhere near as common as folks make out and tend to be applied to whole units rather than individual officers (e.g. the gold trim on all the Sleeves MS's). 

Quite a few mass produced mobile suits were bright orange or yellow, and funky purple and not just for the aces or commanders, but for basic grunts as well.

[Seto Kaiba]

2 hours ago, Big s said:

I still think it’s a bored military. There’s probably no taxes to worry, just people serving for the most part. I know they make a wage, but they never got into all the politics or economics. The need for a military may not exist, but the need to be ready just in case does. Either for non connected humans finding the planet to have resources or troubles from within.

TBH, I don't think the argument that the Southern Cross Army is a useless chocolate box regiment tracks with anything in the series...

They're way too heavily armed to be just a peacekeeping force and a way to keep bored teenagers out of trouble.  They have a purely military space fleet, three or four separate Army air services, a half-dozen terrain-specific specialist teams, an armored cavalry corps, and even reserve formations.  That isn't a for-show army, these people are armed like they're wishing a mother****er would.

Which makes no sense, because there's literally nobody for them to be beefing with.

 

2 hours ago, Big s said:

Quite a few mass produced mobile suits were bright orange or yellow, and funky purple and not just for the aces or commanders, but for basic grunts as well.

Yeah... as I said, there's not a lot of point in trying to camouflage an 18m tall 80t robot.  You might as well paint it in bright colors to scare the enemy and make it easier for units to coordinate when radar is off the table, or just because that's the color of paint you had.

Spoiler

A joke that comes back a number of times in Gundam is that some of the odd color choices are simply what the ground crew had on hand at the time or mixing paints due to not having enough of any one color.  There are several books that have claimed Char's custom red is actually just the anti-rust basecoat and that the MS isn't painted at all as the ground crew doesn't like him.  The first time the gag shows up in an actual show is IBO, where the Ryusei-Go (a modified Graze) is pink because all they had on hand was white and red from the Gundam.

Of course, Southern Cross did it because they were ripping off Gundam and there's no actual rhyme or reason to it there.

[JB0]

5 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

There are several books that have claimed Char's custom red is actually just the anti-rust basecoat and that the MS isn't painted at all as the ground crew doesn't like him. 

Char Customs hit different when he's driving around in a bare-primer ride.

[Big s]

9 minutes ago, JB0 said:

Char Customs hit different when he's driving around in a bare-primer ride.

At least in the sequel he has a gold bling ride

[Seto Kaiba]

10 hours ago, Big s said:

At least in the sequel he has a gold bling ride

Which is also ironically not painted... the glossy appearance is actually a clear laminate vehicle wrap protecting the dull yellow ablative armor emulsion coating the bare composite armor and frame.  It's purely functional.  That it happens to look like a tacky gold spray job is purely coincidental.  

Though, as I said, there's really no reason to try to camouflage a giant robot.  There are few things in the world more conspicuous (or more noisy) than a chunk of metal the size of a house that's decided to go for a walk.  Anime's preoccupation with giving them fancy paintjobs can be, to an extent, forgiven because low observable stealth just doesn't apply in this case.  It seems unlikely that Southern Cross's creators actually understood this point, though... as the paintjobs in the series are a bit too Gundam-inspired to be the work of an original thinker.

[Big s]

7 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Which is also ironically not painted... the glossy appearance is actually a clear laminate vehicle wrap protecting the dull yellow ablative armor emulsion coating the bare composite armor and frame.  It's purely functional.  That it happens to look like a tacky gold spray job is purely coincidental.  

Though, as I said, there's really no reason to try to camouflage a giant robot.  There are few things in the world more conspicuous (or more noisy) than a chunk of metal the size of a house that's decided to go for a walk.  Anime's preoccupation with giving them fancy paintjobs can be, to an extent, forgiven because low observable stealth just doesn't apply in this case.  It seems unlikely that Southern Cross's creators actually understood this point, though... as the paintjobs in the series are a bit too Gundam-inspired to be the work of an original thinker.

It’s really just the rule of cool in sci fi. Why make a stormtrooper bright white? Or even worse, why make the scout troopers that mostly are trying to stay hidden bright white. It’s because they’re a fictional military and sometimes the colors or bling are for symbolism or status rather than for function 

[sketchley]

2 hours ago, Big s said:

It’s really just the rule of cool in sci fi. Why make a stormtrooper bright white? Or even worse, why make the scout troopers that mostly are trying to stay hidden bright white. It’s because they’re a fictional military and sometimes the colors or bling are for symbolism or status rather than for function 

Expanding on that: in Star Wars's case, it's also so that the viewer can recognize what they are looking at within half a second of seeing it.

The manga artist Masamune Shirow also mentioned something along these lines: if he was real-world accurate, the reader/viewer wouldn't be able to see the character, let alone grasp which character they are looking at!

So, yeah, whatever I personally feel about the characters/story/mecha in Southern Cross, the garish, bright colours and decorated armour are neither here nor there for me.

[DewPoint]

So speaking of Star Wars...  Following my trauma that was Episodes 7, 8 & 9, I had an epiphany of sorts.  I now like to remind people (because it amuses me) that the Empire is the "Legitimately Elected Government".  Aside from the issues with "Terrorists" (Rebels), It is largely a peaceful time.  As such, Storm Troopers are largely used as a "Police Force" and as such need to stand out as representatives of the "Legitimately Elected Government". 

[Big s]

1 hour ago, DewPoint said:

So speaking of Star Wars...  Following my trauma that was Episodes 7, 8 & 9, I had an epiphany of sorts.  I now like to remind people (because it amuses me) that the Empire is the "Legitimately Elected Government".  Aside from the issues with "Terrorists" (Rebels), It is largely a peaceful time.  As such, Storm Troopers are largely used as a "Police Force" and as such need to stand out as representatives of the "Legitimately Elected Government". 

I kinda get that symbolism, but a scout should probably blend in, but I still think they look cool in white. Their bike blends in fairly well on Endor, but in the Mandalorian even the bikes were white. It’s almost as if they understood camouflage but didn’t at the same time. Well that’s sci-fi and that’s why I tend to forgive it.

[JB0]

Glossy white is the perfect camoflage, because it reflects the surroundings!

[CoryHolmes]

13 hours ago, Big s said:

It’s really just the rule of cool in sci fi. Why make a stormtrooper bright white? Or even worse, why make the scout troopers that mostly are trying to stay hidden bright white. It’s because they’re a fictional military and sometimes the colors or bling are for symbolism or status rather than for function 

No, the reason why is so people like us can argue, bicker, nitpick, and otherwise disparage each other's head canon explanations!

 

Imma stick with my knight-in-shining-armour theme, tyvm.  It makes total sense after the Rain of Death!

[Big s]

3 hours ago, CoryHolmes said:

No, the reason why is so people like us can argue, bicker, nitpick, and otherwise disparage each other's head canon explanations!

 

Imma stick with my knight-in-shining-armour theme, tyvm.  It makes total sense after the Rain of Death!

To me the reason doesn’t matter. I love the armor and it’s the best part of the show. The mecha is ok to me, but the armor designs are what caught my imagination as a kid and still look cool to me now. 

[CoryHolmes]

15 hours ago, Big s said:

To me the reason doesn’t matter. I love the armor and it’s the best part of the show. The mecha is ok to me, but the armor designs are what caught my imagination as a kid and still look cool to me now. 

Or that, yeah.  Rule of Cool has been a thing forever and it has its place in shows of all types.

 

 

 

...

 

 

 

...

 

 

... spoilsport

[shazam]

On 8/28/2023 at 2:17 PM, Convectuoso said:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/276018561506?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=50s2egejR92&sssrc=4429486&ssuid=ZxaL2R1kSb2&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY

 

This figure has currently 32 bids and 10 bidders.

It's currently fetching $820 with just under 2 days to go until the auction ends.

 

Someday there will be a fully transformable Hovertank for the masses. 

https://www.bigbadtoystore.com/Product/VariationDetails/127580?o=4

Estimated to arrive in September 2023.

Perhaps this figure might be out in time for Xmas. 🤔

 

 

[tekering]

4 hours ago, shazam said:

Perhaps this figure might be out in time for Xmas. 🤔

I hate to burst your bubble, but that figure's a prototype that will never see the light of day. 

Instead, we're getting this:

BBTS just never bothered to update their listing. 😐

[Seto Kaiba]

On 8/31/2023 at 5:50 PM, Big s said:

It’s really just the rule of cool in sci fi. Why make a stormtrooper bright white? Or even worse, why make the scout troopers that mostly are trying to stay hidden bright white. It’s because they’re a fictional military and sometimes the colors or bling are for symbolism or status rather than for function 

In my experience, people who default to "rule of cool" tend to paint with far too broad a brush and miss that it's far more often being done for practical and/or symbolic reasons by the art staff.

Why are the Stormtroopers bright white?  It's partly because "gloss white is futuristic" was in full force at the time the first film was made and their helmets are meant to be stylized skulls, which is Rule of Cool in part, but it's also symbolic.  Their sterile white armor and stylized skull-faced helms were meant to be evocative of their role as fascist enforcers (the armor is literally referred to as "fascist white armored suits" in the script for A New Hope*), and as the Stormtrooper name implies they're both shock troops and political enforcers.  Their armor is not meant to be camouflaged... it's meant to be high visibility so that it can be feared.  Their presence is meant to intimidate like their namesake.

For the same reason, Char's custom Mobile Suits in the original Gundam are painted not just red but their own unique shade of red not just because's a "Red Baron"-type ace, but to make his Mobile Suit recognizable among the otherwise identical-looking Mobile Suits of the same type and so that the red of his Mobile Suit wouldn't blur into the red portions of the Gundam or other designs in the animation.  Zeon's whole aesthetic is modeled on WW2 Germany's, and designs introduced after the Zaku were given other colors besides the Wehrmact officer green in order to make them easier to tell apart, especially since the first one Tomino was forced to introduce when they switched to a borderline "monster of the week" format was the very similar looking Gouf.

Where Southern Cross is concerned, however, it's really more like... "Rule of Lazy Reuse".  Even toned down, the Arming Doublet's samurai armor aesthetic doesn't really fit with the design aesthetic of the rest of the series.  They spent a lot of time on it when they were developing the series as Science Fiction Sengoku Saga and either couldn't bear to toss the designs and/or didn't have enough time to make a new design that would actually mesh with the show's style.  The color schemes aren't really "rule of cool", it's just what they've ripped off.  The Bioroids are different colors because they're styled after the Principality of Zeon's main Mobile Suits from Mobile Suit Gundam like the Zaku II, Gouf, and Dom, and that shows though not just in their concept, sound effects, and color scheme, but even in things like the external energy conduits and the late period Bioroid Type I "inheriting" the Dom's cruciform visor.  Similarly, the Spartas is red, white, and blue because it's modeled on the Gundam and GM, and they tried to go the Macross route in making it easy to tell which model was the hero's with head variants... and then did such a crap job animating the series that most people don't know there are three different heads for the Spartas because the differences are too subtle to make out and indistinguishable from the show's frequently off-model animation.  The only one who really got subjected to "Rule of Cool" was Marie Angel, who got an orange Logan despite frequently being the only Logan pilot onscreen, just to make her stand out that much more.

"Rule of Cool" is a thing... but it's easy to mistake deliberate practical or artistic choices for it if you're not paying attention.

 

*As provided in The Art of Star Wars, edited by Carol W. Titelman, Ballentine Books, 1979, on page 18.

[Big s]

4 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Why are the Stormtroopers bright white?  It's partly because "gloss white is futuristic" was in full force at the time the first film was made and their helmets are meant to be stylized skulls, which is Rule of Cool in part, but it's also symbolic.  Their sterile white armor and stylized skull-faced helms were meant to be evocative of their role as fascist enforcers (the armor is literally referred to as "fascist white armored suits" in the script for A New Hope*), and as the Stormtrooper name implies they're both shock troops and political enforcers.  Their armor is not meant to be camouflaged... it's meant to be high visibility so that it can be feared.  Their presence is meant to intimidate like their namesake.

I’d agree with that, but they tend to break those rules in Star Wars often. The pilots had black armor so they’d camouflage in space to prevent rescue. And there’s the later Shore Troopers with tan, and even the later scouts have white bikes instead of brown as kind of a back and forth with the rules for the empire’s armor.

As far a the fascist symbolism, the world in southern cross seems a bit of a military rule kinda world. Even the police have armor and military weapons. The back story never did get fleshed out enough, but there does seem to be a lot of that just because we’re human, doesn’t make us all good guys kinda thing from all anime at the time. They just seem very lax on training.

It’s almost as if they needed a military to progress technology. Kinda like the government said they needed to advance technology to avoid just being a bunch of farming colonists forever. Possibly an idea taken from Votoms, but in a rushed less entertaining way.

[shazam]

9 hours ago, tekering said:

I hate to burst your bubble, but that figure's a prototype that will never see the light of day. 

Instead, we're getting this:

BBTS just never bothered to update their listing. 😐

Yeah I know. It is more about when this figure is being released and not the photo of the figure.

[Seto Kaiba]

8 hours ago, Big s said:

I’d agree with that, but they tend to break those rules in Star Wars often. The pilots had black armor so they’d camouflage in space to prevent rescue. And there’s the later Shore Troopers with tan, and even the later scouts have white bikes instead of brown as kind of a back and forth with the rules for the empire’s armor.

Golly, those goalposts moved quick once I demonstrated there were actual explicit artistic and symbolic reasons rather than just "Rule of Cool".  

I'd point out that the pilots aren't Stormtroopers, they're Navy personnel not Army.  The other examples are from films made over thirty years later by a completely different set of filmmakers so it's not exactly surprising that the new team may have their own artistic vision separate from that of the original creators.  Stormtroopers of other colors might be running on "rule of cool" rather than an intentional artistic statement, potentially because the stormtrooper armor itself has become symbolic of fictional fascism.

 

8 hours ago, Big s said:

As far a the fascist symbolism, the world in southern cross seems a bit of a military rule kinda world. Even the police have armor and military weapons. The back story never did get fleshed out enough, but there does seem to be a lot of that just because we’re human, doesn’t make us all good guys kinda thing from all anime at the time. They just seem very lax on training.

The aforementioned fascist symbolism is specific to Star Wars's Stormtroopers.

There doesn't seem to be any real artistic statement behind the Arming Doublet in Southern Cross.  It's a holdover from an earlier series concept that Tatsunoko recycled to save time as they rushed Southern Cross into production to meet the network and licensee deadlines.  It was originally sci-fi ou-yoroi armor for a Sengoku period drama IN SPACE but due to that concept being dropped in favor of chasing the trend set by Gundam and Macross it was imported into a setting that doesn't have a strong Japanese cultural bias the way a space fantasy version of Japan's warring states period did.  It'd make sense in context of Glorie had a large Japanese population or something along those lines, but the series has only one minor asian character and the rest of its design aesthetic lacks any overtly Japanese stylistic touches.  The Arming Doublet and its samurai-inspired design aspects don't make sense in context, it's obviously impractical, there's no in-universe explanation to justify it.

 

8 hours ago, Big s said:

It’s almost as if they needed a military to progress technology. Kinda like the government said they needed to advance technology to avoid just being a bunch of farming colonists forever. Possibly an idea taken from Votoms, but in a rushed less entertaining way.

This is potentially a political topic, so I want to avoid making it political by keeping it in abstract terms.

Research costs money, which is why researchers look for corporate backing, for investors, for grant money, and so on.  The more you fund research in a field the more that field will advance and produce usable results.  Military technology produces the most, and most visible, results because that's the field developed nations throw the most money at by literal orders of magnitude.

[jenius]

More thought has gone into this thread then went into Super Dimensional Calvary Southern Cross. 

[Big s]

7 hours ago, jenius said:

More thought has gone into this thread then went into Super Dimensional Calvary Southern Cross. 

Probably true, unfortunately 

[Seto Kaiba]

11 hours ago, jenius said:

More thought has gone into this thread then went into Super Dimensional Calvary Southern Cross. 

That's not just true, and an astonishingly low bar to clear, it was also essentially my point.  

99% of the time, the answer to "Why is it like that?" in Southern Cross is "because nobody thought this through."

"Why do the almost exclusively Western European space colonists wear impractical samurai-inspired body armor?"  Because the armor was designed for another series concept that didn't get green-lit and the show's staff were pressed for time and couldn't be arsed to design something that actually fit with the final product's design aesthetic.  "Why is the Spartas's crew compartment exposed in two of its three modes?"  Because the studio massively underestimated the difficulty of designing a believable transforming robot. etc.

[shazam]

Robotech Masters Saga Hovertank Prototype sold for US $2,025.00  😲

https://www.ebay.com/itm/276018561506?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=50s2egejR92&sssrc=4429486&ssuid=ZxaL2R1kSb2&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY

 

Edited September 4, 2023 by shazam

[ValkAddict]

Damn

 

[505thAirborne]

Not too shabby, it's definitely a one of a kind. 

[Seto Kaiba]

Not surprised. I guess the folks who were bidding on it have a proper understanding that there will probably never be an official commercially available transforming Spartas toy.

It really is a one of a kind collectible. And with the amounts some of the robotech fans have pledged to things like kickstarters, this isn't even that much.

[Big s]

3 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Not surprised. I guess the folks who were bidding on it have a proper understanding that there will probably never be an official commercially available transforming Spartas toy.

It really is a one of a kind collectible. And with the amounts some of the robotech fans have pledged to things like kickstarters, this isn't even that much.

I wouldn’t say never. Some of these companies doing the Robotech branding are definitely running thin on vf-1 variants and reissues. There’s been a few Mospeada items lately and they may have to get creative and finally roll out some southern cross items at some point.

[Seto Kaiba]

20 minutes ago, Big s said:

I wouldn’t say never. Some of these companies doing the Robotech branding are definitely running thin on vf-1 variants and reissues. There’s been a few Mospeada items lately and they may have to get creative and finally roll out some southern cross items at some point.

I would.

That's kind of the pattern we've been following for the last 23 years and counting. The toy licensee in question will do all of the VF-1 variants, then they either give up or move on to the MOSPEADA mecha. Then they give up. They never ever move on to Southern Cross. It has been thus ever since Toynami had the license and refused to even consider doing the Southern Cross designs because the expected return on investment was much too low.

With no Japanese toys to copy, anyone doing Southern Cross mecha toys is going to have to invest a lot more time, money, and effort into designing the toys from scratch. That will naturally have implications for quality and cost, but it's also going to make it significantly harder to turn a profit. Southern Cross is the basis for Robotech's least popular saga, and with sales already falling precipitously when they transition from Macross to MOSPEADA the expectation would be the sales will slip even further when they switch to Southern Cross. Selling a large number of toys will almost certainly be impossible, so they can do one of two things: raise the price or reduce the quality. The problem is that doing either to the extent that it makes the toy profitable effectively precludes production.

And if the licensees Harmony Gold had 23 years ago couldn't find a way to make the toy profitable when interest in Robotech was peaking, they're sure as hell not going to find it now a good decade after the franchise curled up and died for the second time. This toy prototype that ended up being sold at auction is a product of failing to look before one leaps.

[jenius]

Are there any good 3D models of a Hovertank that could transform and look decent in all modes? I think that's where we need to start. Then maybe the STLs can be sold and people can build their own. 

[tekering]

1 hour ago, jenius said:

Are there any good 3D models of a Hovertank that could transform and look decent in all modes? I think that's where we need to start.

Dyson MAX made this a couple of years ago using Blender.  It's a fully 3D model that's perfectly anime-accurate...

...but I'm not sure it transforms. 🤔

Edited September 4, 2023 by tekering
Confirmed. It doesn't transform.