The Newbie and Short Questions thread

[pengbuzz]

51 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

The ancient Protoculture seem to have tried that in a way, protecting planets like Uroboros and Windermere IV by surrounding them with artificial fold faults.

Its viability as a defensive strategy is... questionable.

Yeah, but just imagine if it overloaded and went off like the Macross' did: poof, no more fleet!

[cheemingwan1234]

Do you think that the NUNS will eventually break up into smaller successor governments, judging from the events of Delta and Frontier?

[Seto Kaiba]

7 minutes ago, cheemingwan1234 said:

Do you think that the NUNS will eventually break up into smaller successor governments, judging from the events of Delta and Frontier?

Seems unlikely, given that Macross is a fundamentally optimistic series.

In 2051, the New UN Government went through a reorganization to give individual emigrant governments more autonomy in the wake of ousting a fascist group that was trying to concentrate all governing authority on Earth.  Kawamori has compared the current form of the New UN Government after that reorganization to the European Union in terms of its balance of power.

If anything, I'd say the opposite is far more likely as fold technology continues to improve and travel and communication between planets and fleets continues to get faster, easier, and more reliable.  Once "super" fold tech based on fold quartz enters the picture, fold faults stop being obstacles to all of that and the galaxy itself becomes a much smaller and easier-to-navigate place.

The reason we have a regional power bloc in Macross Delta is that the Brisingr globular cluster is still a remote and relatively inaccessible place thanks to the fold faults around it and its position on the edge of the galaxy almost as far away from Earth as you can get.  Windermere IV's decision to withdraw from the New UN Government is for some rather... unique... reasons tied to the unusually short lifespans of the planet's inhabitants.

[TehPW]

On 10/10/2022 at 11:49 AM, Seto Kaiba said:

The Grand Cannon concept didn't really do so great in the First Space War.  It fundamentally assumes the enemy's going to achieve orbital supremacy, and at that point you're very likely already hosed, as was the case in its only use.

You forget: How many Grand Cannons on earth (and the moon) was being built/excavated at the time of Eps 27? Had the UNS had the time, maybe their plan (Defense of the Orbital region by Offense 360 beams) Might have worked...

[JB0]

1 hour ago, TehPW said:

You forget: How many Grand Cannons on earth (and the moon) was being built/excavated at the time of Eps 27? Had the UNS had the time, maybe their plan (Defense of the Orbital region by Offense 360 beams) Might have worked...

Even if it didn't work, the zentradi might would've been stunned briefly by the audacity of someone equipping a stationary planet to do a death blossom.

[Seto Kaiba]

2 hours ago, TehPW said:

You forget: How many Grand Cannons on earth (and the moon) was being built/excavated at the time of Eps 27? Had the UNS had the time, maybe their plan (Defense of the Orbital region by Offense 360 beams) Might have worked...

Three more.  It would have been four, but Grand Cannon II was destroyed in the Unification Wars... so the coverage had a pretty big hole in it.

Unfortuantely because of how long it took for the Grand Cannon systems to charge up, it's unlikely they would have ever got the first shot off... which is probably why the idea was dropped after humanity moved out into space.

[RaisingCane]

How was the Grand Cannon aimed?  As I recall, it was just a big, immobile shaft.

[RaisingCane]

Has anyone ever identified the Zentradi ships in this scene?  I don't recognize some of them.

 

[Seto Kaiba]

19 hours ago, RaisingCane said:

How was the Grand Cannon aimed?  As I recall, it was just a big, immobile shaft.

Its description in Macross Chronicle's Technology Sheet for it mentions that the uppermost conical section of the Grand Cannon's barrel contains a deflection field generator that is used to skew the beam's firing angle by up to 120 degrees.  

Presumably it's something similar to the spatial distortions that are used to corral the beam of the Macross-class's main gun or the ones used to aim the "high angle" beam guns of certain Zentradi and Human ships by locally warping space similar to a pinpoint barrier.

 

1 minute ago, RaisingCane said:

Has anyone ever identified the Zentradi ships in this scene?  I don't recognize some of them.

 

Nope.  There are a number of designs that are thrown in for just one specific shot or cut that have no official information.

 

[Seto Kaiba]

As an addendum, outside of the main Zentradi designs of the Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV anime and Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Do You Remember Love? movie, I believe there's only been one other named class of Zentradi warship added... and that was in a canon game in the Macross II timeline.  That was Quamzin's Oktii Granduraa flagship from the PC Engine games.

[RaisingCane]

Doesn't the ship on the far right of that shot strongly resemble the Meltran LST from DYRL?

[Seto Kaiba]

12 minutes ago, RaisingCane said:

Doesn't the ship on the far right of that shot strongly resemble the Meltran LST from DYRL?

Not to me?  It's just kinda... square?

There are a few in-joke references in that episode but I don't believe that's one.

[RaisingCane]

It also seems kinda odd that they'd be sitting out of a big battle like that.

[Seto Kaiba]

1 minute ago, RaisingCane said:

It also seems kinda odd that they'd be sitting out of a big battle like that.

Well, maybe... then again, maybe not.  It'd really depend what operational role those classes of ship are for and/or what the job of their parent fleet is.

For instance, you wouldn't necessarily want to dispatch specialist ships for support roles like tugs, tenders, couriers, or rescue and recovery ships to the front lines of a major fleet action.  Esp. if they're earmarked for the cleanup afterwards.

Alternatively, there may be other reasons that they were not dispatched like being in the middle of being reprovisioned, awating a new crew or commanding officer, being part of a skeleton crew of defenses for the mobile fortress, or being a mobile reserve just in case something goes wrong.

[sketchley]

13 minutes ago, RaisingCane said:

It also seems kinda odd that they'd be sitting out of a big battle like that.

In universe: they were either damaged and waiting repair or restocking (if memory serves, that's some of the features of the Mobile Fortress), or high-value assets not needed in the battle (one doesn't general deploy sensitive recon equipment right into a pitched battle).

 

Production wise, they were merely added to the scene to provide a sense of scale and perspective.

[TG Remix]

14 hours ago, RaisingCane said:

Has anyone ever identified the Zentradi ships in this scene?  I don't recognize some of them.

 

I dunno if it's me or not, but the one at the bottom middle seems two ship "arms" away from being a Zentradi-based Macross-type ship.

 

They kinda look too..."triangular(?)" to be Kazutaka designs for the series; his ships had a lot of round edges and not like his later DYRL Meltradi ships. Wouldn't be surprised if these were from the Studio Nue animators themselves.

[darkranger12]

Grmph.  No mention of when Nozomi/Sony's releasing the dvds of Macross 7, frontier and delta in the US right?

[RaisingCane]

Any idea what this is?  I assume it's a NUN space station over Eden, but there's nothing on it at M3.

[Seto Kaiba]

12 hours ago, RaisingCane said:

Any idea what this is?  I assume it's a NUN space station over Eden, but there's nothing on it at M3.

Some kind of space station or satellite...one that looks like it was designed by someone who plays Dark Eldar in WH40K or has seen Hellraiser too many times.

It's one of those background designs for which there really isn't any info.

[darkranger12]

Random and general question here: If the next installment doesn't follow zettai live,  what would the story be?

[Bolt]

29 minutes ago, darkranger12 said:

Random and general question here: If the next installment doesn't follow zettai live,  what would the story be?

Could be anything. Probably won't have anything to do with Delta directly. As per Macross .

But, i have a feeling it will involve transforming mecha, music and a love triangle (as well as bonus Itano circus)

Edited October 16, 2022 by Bolt

[Seto Kaiba]

41 minutes ago, darkranger12 said:

Random and general question here: If the next installment doesn't follow zettai live,  what would the story be?

It could be anything.

Kawamori has, in the past, expressed a disinclination to do direct sequels.  He likes to branch out and get weird and experimental with his work and whatever interest or topic has taken his attention tends to end up getting rolled into what he's working on.  Sometimes it's a cultural interest like the trip to Nepal that spawned Escaflowne, and sometimes it's a social issue like the "Save the Whales" of Macross Dynamite 7 (or the more politically loaded aesops in Frontier and Delta).  

The one thing we can be reasonably confident about is that the next Macross series will almost certainly distance itself from previous works as every new Macross series has.  It'll be set somewhere new and with a bunch of new characters and mecha.  The number of references to previous shows will be kept to a minimum and broad strokes only so that the series remains accessible to new audiences.  By distancing each new Macross title from its predecessors that way, he can get away with experimenting with other genres and isn't locked into a particular concept of the setting.

[TG Remix]

A part of me considering one of the concerts from Zettai Live!!! wonders if they'll go completely 3D. At this point I'd say their character animation in that field doesn't look bad in it, though I can imagine that being somehow more expensive. Honestly considering Kawamori usually goes forward within the franchise, I wouldn't mind if later down the road we get side-stuff that's not written/directed by him but still has the Macross feel, whether that'd be light novels (such as The Ride) or even a ONA of sorts from a previous time.

Even though it's a dream that probably won't come, a part of me really wants a Gundam MSV type series where it showcases designs not particularly for a series but just to show off and make kits of, for Valkyries, Zentradi stuff, ships, etc. This is definitely not an excuse to finally get official designs for unseens like the VA-14, VAB-2, or YF-24, no siree. 😁

[darkranger12]

On 10/12/2022 at 9:02 AM, Seto Kaiba said:

Seems unlikely, given that Macross is a fundamentally optimistic series.

In 2051, the New UN Government went through a reorganization to give individual emigrant governments more autonomy in the wake of ousting a fascist group that was trying to concentrate all governing authority on Earth.  Kawamori has compared the current form of the New UN Government after that reorganization to the European Union in terms of its balance of power.

If anything, I'd say the opposite is far more likely as fold technology continues to improve and travel and communication between planets and fleets continues to get faster, easier, and more reliable.  Once "super" fold tech based on fold quartz enters the picture, fold faults stop being obstacles to all of that and the galaxy itself becomes a much smaller and easier-to-navigate place.

The only bottleneck to super fold tech would be where you would get fold quartz I guess.   In any case I guess super folds would allow Central to respond faster to threats in the galaxy.

[Seto Kaiba]

7 minutes ago, darkranger12 said:

The only bottleneck to super fold tech would be where you would get fold quartz I guess.   In any case I guess super folds would allow Central to respond faster to threats in the galaxy.

Of course, the scarcity of secondhand fold quartz from Protoculture ruins and Vajra carcasses will only be a temporary bottleneck.

The ancient Protoculture developed the technology to synthesize fold quartz.  Clues from the official timeline suggest that the reason it's so scarce is they were still experimenting with applications for the stuff when their civilization collapsed* and it was the generations of refugees thereafter who truly perfected the technology and used it on a large scale to manufacture things like the Protoculture System and the later models of Fold Evil.

Many sources mention humanity has been steadily improving its fold carbon synthesis techniques since OTEC first discovered the stuff aboard the ASS-1 in the early 2000s.  The writeup in Macross Chronicle does indicate that the bar has been set higher since humanity discovered fold quartz, and that research in how to synthesize it is underway.

 

* Due, ironically enough, to one such experiment's catastrophic failure.  The activation experiments for a prototype biotechnological fold dimensional energy converter resulted in the bio-weapons they were installed on becoming possessed by energy beings from super dimension space, who subsequently became known as the Protodeviln during their rampage across Protoculture space.

[RaisingCane]

4 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

The ancient Protoculture developed the technology to synthesize fold quartz.

Will the Megaroad find it when they discover the homeworld of the Protoculture?  Or was it hidden inside the Macross the whole time?

[Bolt]

There's no indication that the Megaroad will find anything. Least of all the Protoculture home world. If it was hidden inside the Macross, it's still there.

[Seto Kaiba]

5 minutes ago, RaisingCane said:

Will the Megaroad find it when they discover the homeworld of the Protoculture? 

Unlikely for a bunch of reasons, the most important of which is a spoiler for Absolute Live!!!!!!.

It's unlikely there's much of anything to find on the Protoculture's homeworld if someone did find it... and that's assuming the planet itself is still there to find.  It's very likely that the Protoculture's original homeworld was conquered by the Supervision Army and subsequently destroyed either by the Protoculture themselves or the Zentradi as per their standard practice.  And that would have been back when the Zentradi still had access to reaction munitions so the damage would've been even worse than it was when the Boddole Zer main fleet torched Earth.

If there's a surviving record of the technique the Protoculture used to create synthetic fold quartz, it's probably on one of the remote planets they settled right before going extinct like Uroboros or Windermere IV or in the ruins of one of their emigrant fleets or space colonies.

 

5 minutes ago, RaisingCane said:

Or was it hidden inside the Macross the whole time?

This ain't the R-word show... there was absolutely nothing special about the Supervision Army gunship that crashed on Earth in Macross.

[pengbuzz]

16 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

This ain't the R-word show... there was absolutely nothing special about the Supervision Army gunship that crashed on Earth in Macross.

Except of course the fact that Earth rebuilt it and used it to destroy Boddole Zer's base ship.

[Seto Kaiba]

5 minutes ago, pengbuzz said:

Except of course the fact that Earth rebuilt it and used it to destroy Boddole Zer's base ship.

That's more what's special about what humanity did with it after.

Though it is oddly funny to realize that the first 26 episodes of Super Dimension Fortress Macross from the Zentradi perspective are multiple high-ranking commanders repeatedly trying and failing to determine if the Macross's captain is a tactical genius or completely clueless about how space warfare works.  (Episode 27 being the point where a conclusion is reached and the answer is simply "Yes".)

[RaisingCane]

What was the original UN plan for the Macross before the Zentradi arrived?  What if they never showed up at all?

[pengbuzz]

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

That's more what's special about what humanity did with it after.

Though it is oddly funny to realize that the first 26 episodes of Super Dimension Fortress Macross from the Zentradi perspective are multiple high-ranking commanders repeatedly trying and failing to determine if the Macross's captain is a tactical genius or completely clueless about how space warfare works.  (Episode 27 being the point where a conclusion is reached and the answer is simply "Yes".)

I would have to contend that in doing so, they made it special by making it unique. And while they did make more battle fortresses (especially look-alike of the movie version such as the SDFN-01 Global), none were like the original Macross is being a gunboat rebuilt into Earth's first starship.

No other ship will ever be that first one, a hybrid built from a wreck salvage that fell from the sky and became humanity's last hope.

[pengbuzz]

49 minutes ago, RaisingCane said:

What was the original UN plan for the Macross before the Zentradi arrived?  What if they never showed up at all?

Then the original series would have been very short.

[Bolt]

1 hour ago, RaisingCane said:

What was the original UN plan for the Macross before the Zentradi arrived?  What if they never showed up at all?

What was set in motion  ,primarily, was planetary defense. They were pretty sure someone was gonna come looking for their gunboat toy. I'm sure there was already talk of some kind of space exploration. Probably even outside the system, as fold capability was an option.

Edited October 17, 2022 by Bolt

[darkranger12]

I have a question about the walkure....did they use some sort of special simpilfied ex gear for their concerts......no one knows how they can produce holographic clothes like sheryl's suit did right?