The Newbie and Short Questions thread

[Sir Galahad®]

Seto, I think he meant after the Vajra attack. Were there remnants found?

[Seto Kaiba]

39 minutes ago, Sir Galahad® said:

Seto, I think he meant after the Vajra attack. Were there remnants found?

Depends on the version of the story.

In the Macross Frontier TV series, the Macross Galaxy fleet's Mainland and its escort group are assumed to be at large and still intact given that Kawamori has indicated the Galaxy Executives (TV ver.) are still alive and at large.

In the Macross Frontier movies, the Mainland and Battle Galaxy were sunk by the Vajra, so presumably a significant chunk of the civilian population (if such a thing could be said to exist when the fleet was mind-controlled) presumably died.

[sketchley]

3 hours ago, blackconvoy_D01 said:

Does Kawamori have a least favorite valkyrie, and if so; which one?

I remember reading somewhere that Kawamori-san doesn't particularly like the VF-4.

[AN/ALQ128]

7 hours ago, sketchley said:

I remember reading somewhere that Kawamori-san doesn't particularly like the VF-4.

That's a shame, its a pretty unique looking VF.

[blackconvoy_D01]

9 hours ago, sketchley said:

I remember reading somewhere that Kawamori-san doesn't particularly like the VF-4.

 

1 hour ago, AN/ALQ128 said:

That's a shame, its a pretty unique looking VF.

I could see that. In fighter it looks great; personally though I'm not sure about overall functionality in gerwalk or battroid.

[JB0]

Yeah, it is honestly probably the roughest of his VF designs. I like it, but there's a distinct unfinished feel to it.

[Bolt]

23 hours ago, blackconvoy_D01 said:

Does Kawamori have a least favorite valkyrie, and if so; which one?

As far as (his favorite)... toy Valks go..During the Kawamori Expo. Adrian asked the man himself. The wall mounted with (just about) every Valkyrie ever made over the generations..Kawamori's favorite was the old Takatoku VF-1J. Also , there was a giant YF-29 Durandal at the Expo..

 

Edited September 19, 2019 by Bolt

[TehPW]

Yak, Deculture (or Yak, Deculturing). Obviously some people just do not understand the reference but i'll ask here: Does it mean good vibes? Bad? or Both. I like to use it but after a misuse of it today (sadly, I was the adult in the room and blocked further convos), i'd like to know if I was in fact in the wrong?

[Seto Kaiba]

1 minute ago, TehPW said:

Yak, Deculture (or Yak, Deculturing). Obviously some people just do not understand the reference but i'll ask here: Does it mean good vibes? Bad? or Both. I like to use it but after a misuse of it today (sadly, I was the adult in the room and blocked further convos), i'd like to know if I was in fact in the wrong?

Well, technically both... it's kind of contextual, and in later Macross stories it may actually have become a matter of slang.

Originally, in Macross: Do You Remember Love?, "deculture" was a Zentradi/Meltrandi expression of shock, amazement, outrage, and potentially disgust that could be translated as "shocking", "amazing", "bizarre", "unbelievable", or potentially even "gross".  Tacking "Yak" onto the front makes it more emphatic, like saying "how revolting!" or "how strange!".  It would depend on usage whether it were truly positive or negative.  (The Japanese Wikipedia article actually compares the term's usage to the English interjection "Oh my god!" for multipurposefulness.)

Based on a conversation Alto and Ranka have in the first Macross Frontier TV novel, the usage of "deculture" that crops up in later shows appears to be human slang not dissimilar to the American English slang usage of the word "sick"... heavily dated human slang, given that Alto teases her about that being old-fashioned.

Tone and context are about all that stands between "Yak deculture" meaning "That's incredible!" and "That's pretty f*cked up".  The way it's used in Macross: Do You Remember Love? is predominantly negative, since the Zentradi and Meltrandi find humanity's mixed-gender society confusing and more than a little disturbing.  Later Macross titles, especially the Macross Frontier series, use it as a more positive expression.

[Bolt]

From Breetai saying "Deculture.."  to Frontier saying " See you next Deculture.." to " Keep on Deculturing!" It's become the perfect Macross slang. Just watch that  inflection.( my little Deculture..).

[Seto Kaiba]

On 9/25/2019 at 4:50 PM, Bolt said:

From Breetai saying "Deculture.."  to Frontier saying " See you next Deculture.." to " Keep on Deculturing!" It's become the perfect Macross slang. Just watch that  inflection.( my little Deculture..).

Slang that's even used directly in Macross publications like the Macross Frontier Pash! Animation File mook, which uses it as a synonym for "amazing" on several occasions.

[Bolt]

Is there anything close to a Zentradi or Marduk dictionary?

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, Bolt said:

Is there anything close to a Zentradi or Marduk dictionary?

There are a few publications that have glossaries of key terms but not much more than that.

[jeniusornome]

There's a scene early in Macross Delta... second or third episode I think. Hayate and Freyja are walking through the town on Ragna, they come around a corner, and Freyja stops dead, stares, and says something to the effect of... "now that's deculture..."

Camera pans out, going from these cute, seaside, low buildings... homes and such with small alleys between and a kind of rustic, serene feel, to the Macross Elysion just towering over everything there, looking completely out of place.

I thought it was a really good illustration of how the word worked in-universe. Like a combination of "cognitive dissonance!" and "does not compute" and "what the what?"

deculture!

Sounds weird to say it out loud but I can't come up with a better word.

Characters using it in Frontier in a way that someone in another anime might say "sugoi!" or "sugei!" is like the equivalent of all of us running around in the 80s saying things that were awesome were "bad", or later, "sick". Like, literally it made no sense, but colloquially it had been co-opted, for a little while at least, to mean the opposite.

[DewPoint]

so... its like "Smurfy"? 

I was wondering if any of you sick puppies errr... knowledgeable folk knew what Hikaru's (I'm not too sure what the proper term is) call sign/modex number/pilot number was when he was first assigned to Skull Squadron?  I couldn't find it anywhere on the internet and was looking for that specifically on my last watch-through of SDFM.  I found it, but I believe it was only ever used once. 

[jeniusornome]

@DewPoint windermere apples will henceforth be referred to as deculture berries.

[Seto Kaiba]

19 minutes ago, DewPoint said:

I was wondering if any of you sick puppies errr... knowledgeable folk knew what Hikaru's (I'm not too sure what the proper term is) call sign/modex number/pilot number was when he was first assigned to Skull Squadron?  I couldn't find it anywhere on the internet and was looking for that specifically on my last watch-through of SDFM.  I found it, but I believe it was only ever used once. 

023.

Hikaru mentions it exactly once, right before launching from the Prometheus on his first sortie in Ep6 of Super Dimension Fortress Macross.

Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Valkyrie Vol.1 uses that as his aircraft's modex number.  It gives Max and Kakizaki's as 111 and 112 respectively.

Edited October 4, 2019 by Seto Kaiba

[DewPoint]

You guys are AWESOME! I love it!

[Bolt]

Officially, Zentradi forces aligned with NUNS are deployed...I don't really recall more than a few garrison examples in Frontier and Delta. In most fleet battles, there doesn't seem to be a heavy Zentradi presence. I'm not exactly clear how many giant  Zentradi  fleets are aligned with NUNS and what most of their tasks are..

It appears as if NUNS doesn't mix too many ( i know they incorporate some )raw Zentradi ships in their fleets..

[Seto Kaiba]

The New UN Forces only have a couple hundred Zentradi ships at most... compared to the over 9,000 Northampton-class frigates built and commissioned by 2045.  It's not that they aren't out there, it's that they aren't THAT numerous compared to the ships the humans build for their own use.

The main Macross continuity isn't like Macross II, where the Spacy was repo-ing every Zentradi fleet it met.

Edited October 9, 2019 by Seto Kaiba

[Bolt]

Wow. I was really under the impression it was more like a couple of million at the time of Delta..Granted it's a "re-telling" but at the end of DYRL it looks like thousands (at least) Zentradi are left to integrate into Earth forces. It's possible , of course, some left and were not interested in joining Earth or fought to the Death. 

Is there any idea how many Zentradi or how much of a Zentradi fleet departed with Mega Road-01? 

I need to rewatch Flashback..

Edited October 10, 2019 by Bolt

[sketchley]

48 minutes ago, Bolt said:

Is there any idea how many Zentradi or how much of a Zentradi fleet departed with Mega Road-01? 

I need to rewatch Flashback..

Kawamori-san has repeatedly stated 100 ships.  However, that's been to answer such things as your question and how many Zentradi ships joined the Unified Forces in total.

Of course, one thing to keep in mind is that those were answers to questions that are decades apart.  100 appears to be the number that stuck in his head, while the context didn't stick around.  It's also a convenient excuse for why we don't see more Zentradi ships active in Unified Forces fleets—a plausible in-universe excuse to explain the Studio Nue visual design methodology  (an example of their visual design is the at-the-time unexpected replacement of the VF-19 by the VF-171 in MF).

Edited October 10, 2019 by sketchley

[Bolt]

Ok. 100 ships that departed with MG-01 IS plausible. For sure. 

Zentradi forces remaining with Earth Forces should , to me , be far more. But i guess it's just not so..

[sketchley]

24 minutes ago, Bolt said:

Ok. 100 ships that departed with MG-01 IS plausible. For sure. 

Zentradi forces remaining with Earth Forces should , to me , be far more. But i guess it's just not so..

It's one of those "they were there all along.  Just off screen, outside of the camera shot . . ."

The only exception to that rule was the all-Zentradi fleet in Macross 7.  But, even then they only showed multiples of Buritai's flagship . . .

[Seto Kaiba]

2 hours ago, Bolt said:

Wow. I was really under the impression it was more like a couple of million at the time of Delta..Granted it's a "re-telling" but at the end of DYRL it looks like thousands (at least) Zentradi are left to integrate into Earth forces. It's possible , of course, some left and were not interested in joining Earth or fought to the Death. 

DYRL? is an in-universe work of fiction as far as the main Macross continuity is concerned, and it biases more heavily towards the TV series version of events.  Super Dimension Fortress Macross's version of events saw the loyal elements of Boddole Zer's main fleet withdraw from the battlefield as was standard practice for the Zentradi forces when the chain of command was broken by a command ship's destruction.  This tactic was the heart of the UN Spacy-Zentradi alliance's strategy, forcing entire branch fleets to abandon the field by focusing their attacks on command ships.

What was left when the dust settled and the Zentradi who hadn't defected had retreated to attempt to regroup - which doesn't seem to have worked with their chain of command so badly disrupted - was the hundred or so ships loyal to Vrlitwhai that would go on to join the New UN Forces.

 

2 hours ago, Bolt said:

Is there any idea how many Zentradi or how much of a Zentradi fleet departed with Mega Road-01? 

At least a couple, it's doubtful we see the entire fleet given that first generation emigrant fleets are said to be a few dozen ships.

 

 

1 hour ago, sketchley said:

Kawamori-san has repeatedly stated 100 ships.  However, that's been to answer such things as your question and how many Zentradi ships joined the Unified Forces in total.

AFAIK, it's meant to be the latter.

 

 

13 minutes ago, Bolt said:

Ok. 100 ships that departed with MG-01 IS plausible. For sure. 

That's WAY more people than the fleet had... and we know that some of those ships ended up in the hands of the New UN Spacy Marine Corps, while others were seconded for duty as short-distance emigrant ships.

 

13 minutes ago, Bolt said:

Zentradi forces remaining with Earth Forces should , to me , be far more. But i guess it's just not so..

Vrlitwhai only commanded about 1,200 ships... and his forces were up against a fleet that outnumbered them almost four thousand to one.  That he had approximately a hundred ships left in working order when the dust settled is a real testament to how well both his and Exsedol's strategy of focusing fire on enemy command ships and the Minmay Attack worked.

No doubt the New UN Forces have acquired more Zentradi ships along the way, but they're still a small fraction compared to the much smaller, miclone-suitable ships the NUNG has been building by the thousands and they're being put to the most appropriate uses, for Zentradi who prefer to live as giants in military service.

[jeniusornome]

Related: how many humans were living in the SDF-1 when it landed and they started to repopulate the earth?

It seems to me that while other Zentradi forces might join the UN forces over time, it's not like there was another planet of humans just hanging around. So actual humans ought to be extremely uncommon in the galaxy. Even if there were 100,000 people living in the ship (which I think is unlikely given the size of the ship?), assuming an even male/female split, everyone coupling and each couple having two kids, account for some too old to have kids, some die in other conflicts... 50 years later that's... maybe a quarter million humans. And that's also assuming they all stayed behind on Earth. Once you figure some were leaving the planet too, then outside of Macross City I'd be surprised if there were any other large population centers on Earth at all.

Is it safe to assume that practically everyone we see in all later series is 1/2-1/4 Zentradi, even if no one ever brings it up? That would make "pure" humans extremely rare in the galaxy.

[Bolt]

Well,  they did clone humans for immigrant fleets apparently..

So pure humans, initially were probably quite ( relatively) small in numbers for decades..

[JB0]

20 minutes ago, jeniusornome said:

assuming an even male/female split, everyone coupling and each couple having two kids,

While they can't all be the Jenius clan, I would assume that most couples had at least three, due to societal pressure. Two kids merely maintains the status quo, in a world that's suddenly got an awful lot of elbow room and a government that wants to start sending entire cities full of people out into deep space as soon as possible.

 

It is everyone's patriotic duty to help rebuild the population. Be like the Jeniuses, raise a whole herd of kids!

 

[Seto Kaiba]

21 minutes ago, jeniusornome said:

Related: how many humans were living in the SDF-1 when it landed and they started to repopulate the earth?

Around 60,000... ~20,000 crew, and ~40,000 civilians.  There were originally 58,000 civilians, but between those who volunteered for military service and deaths due to various enemy attacks on the Macross, that number dropped a bit.

 

 

21 minutes ago, jeniusornome said:

It seems to me that while other Zentradi forces might join the UN forces over time, it's not like there was another planet of humans just hanging around. So actual humans ought to be extremely uncommon in the galaxy. Even if there were 100,000 people living in the ship (which I think is unlikely given the size of the ship?), assuming an even male/female split, everyone coupling and each couple having two kids, account for some too old to have kids, some die in other conflicts... 50 years later that's... maybe a quarter million humans. And that's also assuming they all stayed behind on Earth. Once you figure some were leaving the planet too, then outside of Macross City I'd be surprised if there were any other large population centers on Earth at all.

Is it safe to assume that practically everyone we see in all later series is 1/2-1/4 Zentradi, even if no one ever brings it up? That would make "pure" humans extremely rare in the galaxy.

There were approximately 1 million human survivors of the First Space War between the refugees and crew aboard the Macross, the surviving UN Spacy ships (two ARMD-class carriers and a handful of Oberth-class destroyers that weren't at Earth), the moon bases, the space colonies and factories at the lagrange points, and the bases under Grand Cannons III and V.

There were approximately 8 million Zentradi survivors living on Earth at the end of the war.

Several human characters like Max Jenius and Shammy Milliome are noted to have had LARGE families, but Earth also cheated up its population numbers using captured Zentradi clone synthesis systems for about twenty years until an increase in the occurrance of recessive genetic illnesses prompted the program's termination.

There are, consequently, reasonably large population centers on Earth, at least one on Mars that we've heard about (Gamlin's home town of H.G. Wells City), and major space colonies ("satellite cities") orbiting several key planets like Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, etc.  If they're launching emigrant ships with populations comparable to modern New York City, there have to be some fairly substantial cities on Earth and Eden in the 2040s, 50s, and 60s.  Even the now-medium-sized emigrant fleets are space conurbations that've got populations comparable to Detroit's.

Zentradi-Human hybrids are not uncommon, but also a long way from being the norm due to humanity's explosive population growth.

 

12 minutes ago, Bolt said:

So pure humans, initially were probably quite ( relatively) small in numbers for decades..

Compared to today, certainly...

[DewPoint]

This is all interesting, but I'm beginning to wonder how does this all get funded?  Socialism?  Everyone does their part to ensure the continuation of the Human race propaganda?

[Seto Kaiba]

Just now, DewPoint said:

This is all interesting, but I'm beginning to wonder how does this all get funded?  Socialism?  Everyone does their part to ensure the continuation of the Human race propaganda?

Taxes... and having twenty-odd factory satellites to do all the heavy lifting, manufacturing-wise, after the war.  Before the war, the military buildup and all of the associated R&D was consuming a significant percentage of the global GDP.

Some of the later, larger emigrant fleets are explicitly acknowledged to have been sponsored by megacorporations.  The 55th large scale long distance emigrant fleet "Macross Frontier" was sponsored by Bilra Transport, a major player in interstellar cargo transportation that established its subsidiary SMS initially as a guard detail to protect it's shipping before branching out into private military contracting.  The 51st ("Macross Galaxy") was, itself, a corporate entity.  It was a flying R&D facility for the defense industry giant General Galaxy, set up as a subsidiary of General Galaxy and managed entirely as a corporate facility.

[sketchley]

19 hours ago, DewPoint said:

This is all interesting, but I'm beginning to wonder how does this all get funded?  Socialism?  Everyone does their part to ensure the continuation of the Human race propaganda?

I don't think there's any political economic system that can adequately describe it.  The closest would be "war time economy" combined with "disaster economy".  Concepts like money probably faded away for quite a few years while humanity got back up on its feet.

[JB0]

2 hours ago, sketchley said:

I don't think there's any political economic system that can adequately describe it.  The closest would be "war time economy" combined with "disaster economy".  Concepts like money probably faded away for quite a few years while humanity got back up on its feet.

Money was definitely de-emphasized. At one point in the "two years later" episodes, Minmay and Kaifun are shown being paid for her performance in soap and food. (Kaifun is unappreciative, to absolutely no one's surprise. And also drunk. He's a real winner here.)

[Bolt]

Never liked that guy..

5 hours ago, sketchley said:

I don't think there's any political economic system that can adequately describe it.  The closest would be "war time economy" combined with "disaster economy".  Concepts like money probably faded away for quite a few years while humanity got back up on its feet.

Ya , there was so much rebuilding to do. Macross city, etc..and so much military hardware to build. Earth forces were already putting the VF-4 into production (seemingly) right after the first space war. And there was the building of Mega Road, as well..so much industry couldn't not generate an economy..even if daily exchanges were based on a barter system, which also makes complete sense. 

[Bolt]

Do we know if Mega Road 01 was a unique design ? Or were the following first generation emigration main ships all the same?