The Newbie and Short Questions thread

[Forper]

Yeah I guess I've thought about this issue before and known it's a matter of suspending disbelief in the interests of entertainment, guess I was wondering if anyone on here could actually pull off explaining it logically. You came close, nice one with the 3D roads haha.

[JB0]

Honestly, I like the roads in DYRL, and that's why it stuck with me.

Artificial gravity makes for interesting roadway possibilities(until something breaks down, then it is just terrifying).

[Bariaburu Faita]

I believe that is the VF-1 "Red Herring"

[Seto Kaiba]

Sweet I didn't know about the harlock reference. Is there a screenshot somewhere?

I had a screen capture of it from the last time someone asked about the in-jokes in Ep27... lemme see if I can find it. If not, I'll take another once I get home.

Why are there so many cafes in Macross city? I counted four different ones just watching DYRL? and going through line art today. That's not including Cafe Variation in the TV show. Which got me thinking more, there's a new Honda being marketed in a scene in DYRL!!! so HOW big is the Macross economy? I can understand it's highly concentrated making for Hong Kong like density but can a city of 76,000 really support a full scale pop concert at the same time as having packed streets, restaurants and cafes? Where exactly would you drive your new Honda by the way? Isn't the city only 500 metres long??!!

's not so unusual... there are plenty of cafes in Tokyo, and in this day in age it seems oddly prophetic when there's a Starbucks, Biggby, or other coffee house on every street corner in the more cosmopolitan cities and suburbs. (Hell, in the office complex where I work there are two Starbucks and at least one two other independent coffee shops¹ inside the building itself, and there are only 14,000 people working here...)

In DYRL? the SDF-1 Macross's circumstances are somewhat different. The version in the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series was a battleship that acquired the city section as a hasty addition to accommodate the (initially) 58,000 civilians displaced from South Ataria Island. The alternate version in the Macross: Do You Remember Love? movie was a purpose-(re)built emigrant ship that was always meant to have the city section inside it. The use of cars in so small an emigrant ship does seem a bit odd, but that was probably a concession forced by the unusual layout of the ship's interior making installing a subway system somewhat implausible. I'd assume that the military was leaning on the businesses aboard to do everything in their power to help maintain a sense of normalcy, concerts and cafes and car sales and so on, for the sake of maintaining morale among the civilian population who were already having to cope with the reality of being trapped in a large hypercarbon box under relentless attack by aliens (while keeping them ignorant of the fact that Earth was already a total loss).

With respect to the actual size of the city, it's worth remembering that the city spread into a number of the Macross's internal spaces, and in a number of places was stacked several layers and tiers deep to make everything fit... plus gravity control let them build on the "walls" and "ceiling" of the habitation blocks, so they weren't limited purely by the available horizontal floorplan. (Mind you, we see this taken up to 11 with Macross Frontier's Island-1, which, in the movies, is shown to have three distinct layers of city, with the two "correctly" oriented ones separated by an upside-down city clinging to the underside of the top layer.)

As far as the broader economy... I refuse to poke too hard at it. It is like trying to figure out why everyone has VFs when a destroid/fighter jet pair ought to be more economical and reliable. In the end, there is no good answer and you just destroy the show's credibility.

As far as the "destroid/fighter jet" thing, I think they did an OK job justifying that on the grounds that destroids were big, heavy things that were hard to ship anywhere quickly or in numbers, and fighter jets can't hold terrain... so the Variable Fighter became the default currency of war by dint of its ability to act as a fighter and an independent fast-travel mode for a land warfare robot.

EDIT: 1. I forgot about the Dunkin' Donuts on 2F in the north wing.

Edited June 13, 2016 by Seto Kaiba

[Seto Kaiba]

This'll probably get merged into the Newbie and Short Questions thread shortly, but anyway...

I'm currently rewatching Itsuwari no Utahime and Sayonara no Tsubasa and I found this VF-1 Variant.

Anybody know the details of this VF-1?

I've seen nothing about it, apart from acknowledgement of its existence, in animation-relevant sources.

IINM, the novelisation of Macross Frontier: Sayonara no Tsubasa identifies it as a VF-1X++ Valkyrie Double Plus... the same (former) Special Forces variant that Macross the Ride protagonist Hakuna Aoba flew a modified version of before his mid-story upgrade. Unfortunately, that is also profoundly unhelpful because no specs exist for the VF-1X++ in its stock format.

[Master Dex]

(Mind you, we see this taken up to 11 with Macross Frontier's Island-1, which, in the movies, is shown to have three distinct layers of city, with the two "correctly" oriented ones separated by an upside-down city clinging to the underside of the top layer.)

I never noticed that.... Might be time for a rewatch of those...

[Seto Kaiba]

I never noticed that.... Might be time for a rewatch of those...

We get a good view in the first Macross Frontier movie, when Ranka is doing that toy advertisement.

[Forper]

The alternate version in the Macross: Do You Remember Love? movie was a purpose-(re)built emigrant ship that was always meant to have the city section inside it.

ah so? Never knew this. Cool

's not so unusual... there are plenty of cafes in Tokyo, and in this day in age it seems oddly prophetic when there's a Starbucks, Biggby, or other coffee house on every street corner in the more cosmopolitan cities and suburbs. (Hell, in the office complex where I work there are two Starbucks and at least one two other independent coffee shops¹ inside the building itself, and there are only 14,000 people working here...)

In DYRL? the SDF-1 Macross's circumstances are somewhat different. The version in the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series was a battleship that acquired the city section as a hasty addition to accommodate the (initially) 58,000 civilians displaced from South Ataria Island. The use of cars in so small an emigrant ship does seem a bit odd, but that was probably a concession forced by the unusual layout of the ship's interior making installing a subway system somewhat implausible. I'd assume that the military was leaning on the businesses aboard to do everything in their power to help maintain a sense of normalcy, concerts and cafes and car sales and so on, for the sake of maintaining morale among the civilian population who were already having to cope with the reality of being trapped in a large hypercarbon box under relentless attack by aliens (while keeping them ignorant of the fact that Earth was already a total loss).

With respect to the actual size of the city, it's worth remembering that the city spread into a number of the Macross's internal spaces, and in a number of places was stacked several layers and tiers deep to make everything fit... plus gravity control let them build on the "walls" and "ceiling" of the habitation blocks, so they weren't limited purely by the available horizontal floorplan. (Mind you, we see this taken up to 11 with Macross Frontier's Island-1, which, in the movies, is shown to have three distinct layers of city, with the two "correctly" oriented ones separated by an upside-down city clinging to the underside of the top layer.)

EDIT: 1. I forgot about the Dunkin' Donuts on 2F in the north wing.

Applause. I think you slam dunked an explanation here. I used to live in Tokyo and work in Shinjuku and yeah there are a damn lot of cafes, thought I'm not familiar with Biggbys it was all Dotour and that Starbucks ripoff I can't think of now. The actual Starbucks was good across from my office near the station, just near Studio Alta, had sausage rolls from my homeland of Downunder...

edit: The starbucks ripoff chain I was thinking of was Excelsior Cafe, and Shinjuku is not really comparable with apparantly over 1,000,000 people using the station every day.

Edited June 14, 2016 by Forper

[ManhattanProject972]

After putting together various Valk replicas in Kerbal Space Program and modding parts to give them close to their true performance without having them break apart doing +25G maneuvers at +mach 3 speeds, I have just one question.

How do Valkyries with under mounted gunpods, especially the SV-51, not shoot off their own noses? Is their muzzle velocity so high they can shoot straight passed the nose as the plane pitches down violently? Because that's the problem I've run into, every time I pitch the nose down when firing, the projectiles fired will collide with underside of the VF's nose. Its even more of a problem with the SV-51 which mounts its gun so far back and isn't given hardly any clearance for the gun to fire without hitting its underside.

[Nazareno2012]

After putting together various Valk replicas in Kerbal Space Program and modding parts to give them close to their true performance without having them break apart doing +25G maneuvers at +mach 3 speeds, I have just one question.

How do Valkyries with under mounted gunpods, especially the SV-51, not shoot off their own noses? Is their muzzle velocity so high they can shoot straight passed the nose as the plane pitches down violently? Because that's the problem I've run into, every time I pitch the nose down when firing, the projectiles fired will collide with underside of the VF's nose. Its even more of a problem with the SV-51 which mounts its gun so far back and isn't given hardly any clearance for the gun to fire without hitting its underside.

220200_screenshots_20160317203823_1.jpg

220200_screenshots_2016-02-09_00161.jpg

Early models of the F-4 Phantom have a SUU-16/A gun pod in a similar centerline mount, and I have not heard of F-4's with that pod shooting their noses.

Edited June 16, 2016 by Nazareno2012

[This Confuses Gamlin]

The F-4's gunpod appears to be installed with a few degrees of down angle also.

[Mr March]

I can't seem to find it now, but I remember reading years ago that even at low muzzle velocities, it takes a maneuver in the hundreds of gs (which would destroy any plane and turn any pilot into sauce) before a jet fighter would ever be in danger of hitting it's own fired munitions. So I don't believe that is a concern, especially in Macross where the muzzle velocities of the gun pods get ridiculously high, far more than conventional jet-mounted projectile weapons.

That being said, there is still the one-in-a-million possibility that a VF could overtake and intercept it's own munitions, like the infamous Tiger 138620 incident

Edited June 16, 2016 by Mr March

[Seto Kaiba]

After putting together various Valk replicas in Kerbal Space Program and modding parts to give them close to their true performance without having them break apart doing +25G maneuvers at +mach 3 speeds, I have just one question.

How do Valkyries with under mounted gunpods, especially the SV-51, not shoot off their own noses? Is their muzzle velocity so high they can shoot straight passed the nose as the plane pitches down violently? Because that's the problem I've run into, every time I pitch the nose down when firing, the projectiles fired will collide with underside of the VF's nose. Its even more of a problem with the SV-51 which mounts its gun so far back and isn't given hardly any clearance for the gun to fire without hitting its underside.

220200_screenshots_20160317203823_1.jpg

220200_screenshots_2016-02-09_00161.jpg

I have a sneaking suspicion that Kerbal Space Program's physics engine may not be properly handling the projectile velocities and collision detection. Is it actually producing discrete projectile objects or just using graphics of a projectile laid on top of a hitscan field?

Even using modern, entirely conventional ammunition it's pretty much impossible for an aircraft to hit itself with shells from its own gun pod because of the physics involved. The muzzle velocity of the bullets coming out of the cannon is relative to the velocity of the aircraft, so the total initial speed of the shell is the aircraft's speed plus the muzzle velocity. With a modern gatling cannon shell like PGU-28/B, to hit yourself with the fired rounds before they clear the airframe the aircraft would have to be pitching down at over Mach 3... and I don't mean "pitching down while flying at Mach 3", I mean that, if you take out all forward momentum, the aircraft's rotational velocity while pitching down at a fixed point in space would have to be at over Mach 3. Even Valkyries don't turn fast enough that they break the sound barrier with their rotational velocity, and the rounds used in Valkyrie gun pods are MUCH faster than anything used today. The GU-11A's shells are traveling at a whopping 2km/s, a little less than double the speed of today's 20 and 30mm anti-aircraft and anti-tank rotary cannon rounds. The GU-15's are moving twice as fast as the GU-11's.

It's possible for modern aircraft to accidentally hit themselves long after their rounds clear the airframe, by entering into a ballistic dive and then suffering hits from the falling shells downrange... but even that's rare as all get-out.

[SebastianP]

I asked this in another thread, but this is probably the more appropriate place:

What is the origin of the "Quiltra-Quelamitz" name for the ship that Kamjin tries to ram into the SDF-1? The Macross Mecha Manual *used* to use it, but now says (without mentioning the exact name) that "fans invented their own name for it". It's still used widely in both English and Japanese works (I was transliterating the fake "Pip-Road/WaveSky" advertisements from what I believe is the back of a series of fanbooks published by Fanky, and found that the Japanese fandom also use the name), but those are essentially brand new (oldest is from 2014), and the name has been around since at least the 1990s.

Anyone have any idea where it actually came from? I assume it has to be from the Japanese fandom somewhere, because they would probably not use a "gaijin" fan invention...

[Seto Kaiba]

I asked this in another thread, but this is probably the more appropriate place:

What is the origin of the "Quiltra-Quelamitz" name for the ship that Kamjin tries to ram into the SDF-1? The Macross Mecha Manual *used* to use it, but now says (without mentioning the exact name) that "fans invented their own name for it". It's still used widely in both English and Japanese works (I was transliterating the fake "Pip-Road/WaveSky" advertisements from what I believe is the back of a series of fanbooks published by Fanky, and found that the Japanese fandom also use the name), but those are essentially brand new (oldest is from 2014), and the name has been around since at least the 1990s.

Anyone have any idea where it actually came from? I assume it has to be from the Japanese fandom somewhere, because they would probably not use a "gaijin" fan invention...

Ah, didn't notice you'd asked this one in two different places... this is the answer I just finished composing from the other thread:

Actually, the Macross Mecha Manual used to use the "Quiltra-Quelamitz class" name too.

We removed the name a few updates back, after I did some digging and was unable to find any official source that referred to that class of vessel by anything other than the type of warship it was... "Medium-sized Gunboat" (中型砲艦), sometimes finessed to "Medium-scale Gun Destroyer" in translation. Some of the Japanese Macross fans I compare notes with on occasion believe it's something that an American licensee came up with, possibly originating from the Palladium Books Robotech role-playing game. That publisher and game had a known habit of trying to come up with Zentradi-sounding names for everything that didn't already have an alien language name in its original source material, some of which sounded fairly plausible and some of which sounded like the result of using text-to-speech with a bad head cold.

[SebastianP]

Ah, didn't notice you'd asked this one in two different places... this is the answer I just finished composing from the other thread:

I don't think this one can be pinned on Palladium - I have very nearly all of the Palladium Robotech and Macross II books (I'm missing two that I know of, which deal with the Southern Cross/Mospaeda/Sentinels part of the timeline), and the ship in question does not appear in any of them. Not under the Quiltra-Quelamitz name, nor any other - it is completely and utterly missing from the Palladium material.

I'm going to go over the art books with a fine tooth comb at some point and see what I can find out about it. I can already feel the cramp I'll be getting in my hand from writing all those kanji on my Intuos...

Edit: Where does the line art come from, BTW? The ship wasn't in Perfect Memory or the Design Works books, and the only image of it in the DYRL Data Bank is the tiny profile from the size comparison pictures.

Also, I think Palladium only had Perfect Memory to work with when they made the original set of RPG books, which would explain some of the errors and missing bits.

Edited June 19, 2016 by SebastianP

[Seto Kaiba]

I don't think this one can be pinned on Palladium - I have very nearly all of the Palladium Robotech and Macross II books (I'm missing two that I know of, which deal with the Southern Cross/Mospaeda/Sentinels part of the timeline), and the ship in question does not appear in any of them. Not under the Quiltra-Quelamitz name, nor any other - it is completely and utterly missing from the Palladium material.

I'm going to go over the art books with a fine tooth comb at some point and see what I can find out about it. I can already feel the cramp I'll be getting in my hand from writing all those kanji on my Intuos...

If not Palladium itself, probably through RPG fan sites... even the Japanese Wiki identifies the name as being something that came out of the Western fandom.

Before we removed the name from the Macross Mecha Manual entry, I carried out a pretty extensive search for any official work that gave the ship a name and came up dry. Every book I found that so much as mentions the ship lists it only as 中型砲艦 (Medium-size Gunboat). The books I consulted include:

• This is Animation 3, 5, and 7 Super Dimension Fortress Macross (not covered in the books)
• This is Animation 11 Macross: Do You Remember Love?
• Macross: Perfect Memory
• Macross: Do You Remember Love? Data Bank (AKA the Gold Book)
• Kazutaka Miyatake Design Works: Macross and Orguss (not covered)
• Entertainment Bible: Studio Nue Mechanical Designs 1 & 2 (not covered)
• Dengeki Data Collection: Super Dimension Fortress Macross (identified, in English! as "Medium-scale Gunboat")
• Entertainment Bible 27 & 51
• Macross Chronicle
• Macross: Do You Remember Love? v1 Blu-Ray limited edition box booklets

[sketchley]

Edit: Where does the line art come from, BTW? The ship wasn't in Perfect Memory or the Design Works books, and the only image of it in the DYRL Data Bank is the tiny profile from the size comparison pictures.

Perfect Memory: Pg 180, bottom left. It gives the impression that it is unfinished (unpolished might be a better word) line art.

[SebastianP]

Huh.

I looked through my stuff and I found a couple of sources you don't mention - not that either of them gives a name for the ship.

In "This is Animation 2", there are pictures of the ship on pages 96 and 98 - the former is the "overgrown" version, front and back view, plus a drawing of the hole it came out of; the latter is a picture of the ship with the jaws opened. The captions didn't yield any especially interesting information, though.

Also, I found an archive labeled "Memorial DVD Box" that had some pencil line art, but it only gave the "Medium-scale Gun Boat" kanji for a description. (The surrounding files inked line art of the other major Zentraedi ships, and all of those except the picket have full names written in Katakana, plus some captions for various features. Miyatake's handwriting sucks way too much for me to be able to decipher it though.)

Anyway, followup question: Where does the name "Oberth" come from for the Space Destroyer? Because that ("Space Destroyer") is the only name I can find for it in the official material.

Edit: Some of the art I've found is hilarious. One of them is a height chart. Hikaru is supposed to be 175 cm tall. Kakizaki? 206 cm. Roy? Two hundred and sixteen centimeters. That's not just seven feet, that's 7'1"...

Edited June 19, 2016 by SebastianP

[Seto Kaiba]

I looked through my stuff and I found a couple of sources you don't mention - not that either of them gives a name for the ship.

That wasn't a complete list by any means... just the ones I could name off the top of my head without having to recall issue numbers and so on. I checked a LOT of sources and came up empty-handed on that front.

Anyway, followup question: Where does the name "Oberth" come from for the Space Destroyer? Because that ("Space Destroyer") is the only name I can find for it in the official material.

Macross: Perfect Memory. It's in the two-page timeline spread on pages 54-55, on the entry for March 2005.

It's a single sentence that mentions that Oberth-class space destroyer No.1 is commissioned in that month.

Edit: Some of the art I've found is hilarious. One of them is a height chart. Hikaru is supposed to be 175 cm tall. Kakizaki? 206 cm. Roy? Two hundred and sixteen centimeters. That's not just seven feet, that's 7'1"...

Yeah, Roy and Kakizaki are big blokes... they cut Roy's height down in Zero. IIRC to a more reasonably 190cm.

Edited June 19, 2016 by Seto Kaiba

[Sir Galahad®]

I had a screen capture of it from the last time someone asked about the in-jokes in Ep27... lemme see if I can find it. If not, I'll take another once I get home.

's not so unusual... there are plenty of cafes in Tokyo, and in this day in age it seems oddly prophetic when there's a Starbucks, Biggby, or other coffee house on every street corner in the more cosmopolitan cities and suburbs. (Hell, in the office complex where I work there are two Starbucks and at least one two other independent coffee shops¹ inside the building itself, and there are only 14,000 people working here...)

In DYRL? the SDF-1 Macross's circumstances are somewhat different. The version in the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series was a battleship that acquired the city section as a hasty addition to accommodate the (initially) 58,000 civilians displaced from South Ataria Island. The alternate version in the Macross: Do You Remember Love? movie was a purpose-(re)built emigrant ship that was always meant to have the city section inside it. The use of cars in so small an emigrant ship does seem a bit odd, but that was probably a concession forced by the unusual layout of the ship's interior making installing a subway system somewhat implausible. I'd assume that the military was leaning on the businesses aboard to do everything in their power to help maintain a sense of normalcy, concerts and cafes and car sales and so on, for the sake of maintaining morale among the civilian population who were already having to cope with the reality of being trapped in a large hypercarbon box under relentless attack by aliens (while keeping them ignorant of the fact that Earth was already a total loss).

With respect to the actual size of the city, it's worth remembering that the city spread into a number of the Macross's internal spaces, and in a number of places was stacked several layers and tiers deep to make everything fit... plus gravity control let them build on the "walls" and "ceiling" of the habitation blocks, so they weren't limited purely by the available horizontal floorplan. (Mind you, we see this taken up to 11 with Macross Frontier's Island-1, which, in the movies, is shown to have three distinct layers of city, with the two "correctly" oriented ones separated by an upside-down city clinging to the underside of the top layer.)

As far as the "destroid/fighter jet" thing, I think they did an OK job justifying that on the grounds that destroids were big, heavy things that were hard to ship anywhere quickly or in numbers, and fighter jets can't hold terrain... so the Variable Fighter became the default currency of war by dint of its ability to act as a fighter and an independent fast-travel mode for a land warfare robot.

EDIT: 1. I forgot about the Dunkin' Donuts on 2F in the north wing.

Weren't there around 300++ VFs and 500++ Destroids in the original series?

[Seto Kaiba]

Weren't there around 300++ VFs and 500++ Destroids in the original series?

Well... yes and no.

At the time of her launch in February 2009, the SDF-1 Macross had a complement of 212 VF-1 Valkyries of various types. It was after the supercarrier Prometheus and supermassive assault ship Daedalus were connected to the Macross that she gained 587 destroids of various types and extended her hangar capacity by utilizing the Prometheus's hangar and flight decks. The Prometheus had a complement of 150 Valkyries, and carriers practically never operate at their maximum capacity, so the actual combined capacity was probably more than the 362 it would've been without combat losses factored in. The way it's presented in-series, it's generally assumed most of the Macross's own VF-1 complement ended up in the Prometheus. (If you don't count combat losses and you factor in the 51+ new destroids built in the onboard factories of the Macross, it's 362 VF-1's and 638 destroids... which is no patch on the DYRL? version, which theoretically had 524 Valkyries between the docked ARMD-01 Harlan J. Niven and ARMD-02 Invincible.)

[camk4evr]

Well... yes and no.

At the time of her launch in February 2009, the SDF-1 Macross had a complement of 212 VF-1 Valkyries of various types. It was after the supercarrier Prometheus and supermassive assault ship Daedalus were connected to the Macross that she gained 587 destroids of various types and extended her hangar capacity by utilizing the Prometheus's hangar and flight decks. The Prometheus had a complement of 150 Valkyries, and carriers practically never operate at their maximum capacity, so the actual combined capacity was probably more than the 362 it would've been without combat losses factored in. The way it's presented in-series, it's generally assumed most of the Macross's own VF-1 complement ended up in the Prometheus. (If you don't count combat losses and you factor in the 51+ new destroids built in the onboard factories of the Macross, it's 362 VF-1's and 638 destroids... which is no patch on the DYRL? version, which theoretically had 524 Valkyries between the docked ARMD-01 Harlan J. Niven and ARMD-02 Invincible.)

And when you add in the ghosts, shuttles and deicated recon craft, the Macross had over 1000 small craft aboard (TV series)

[SebastianP]

Well... yes and no.

At the time of her launch in February 2009, the SDF-1 Macross had a complement of 212 VF-1 Valkyries of various types. It was after the supercarrier Prometheus and supermassive assault ship Daedalus were connected to the Macross that she gained 587 destroids of various types and extended her hangar capacity by utilizing the Prometheus's hangar and flight decks. The Prometheus had a complement of 150 Valkyries, and carriers practically never operate at their maximum capacity, so the actual combined capacity was probably more than the 362 it would've been without combat losses factored in. The way it's presented in-series, it's generally assumed most of the Macross's own VF-1 complement ended up in the Prometheus. (If you don't count combat losses and you factor in the 51+ new destroids built in the onboard factories of the Macross, it's 362 VF-1's and 638 destroids... which is no patch on the DYRL? version, which theoretically had 524 Valkyries between the docked ARMD-01 Harlan J. Niven and ARMD-02 Invincible.)

The ginormous hangar capacities quoted for a lot of the ships make no sense, and neither does a lot of the things we see in Macross City during the TV series and DYRL. A stadium? Seriously, what component of the - need I remind you - 1,200 meter long SDF-1 is big enough that you could build a stadium inside it, with plenty of space above and around it? Even the legs aren't wide enough for that.

I'd go on at great length about the impossibility of the official specs of the ARMD-L (it's smaller than a WW2 Essex! And it's supposed to have an air wing the size of a Cold War Nimitz class? All carried internally? When half the hangar would need to be double height due to Pixie Squadron and Rabbit 1? Who came up with these numbers...) and the absurdity of the Monster on the Asuka II (it's taller than the ship is, from the waterline to the flight deck...), but it wouldn't be good for my blood pressure... so I'll just go with the assumption I just came up with: one of the most common applications of Super Dimension Technology is making things bigger on the inside, and the tech is so subtle you don't even notice when you're passing into a "compressed" area...

[Mazinger]

so I'll just go with the assumption I just came up with: one of the most common applications of Super Dimension Technology is making things bigger on the inside, and the tech is so subtle you don't even notice when you're passing into a "compressed" area...

Wait, so the Protoculture were Timelords? Whoa...

Oh the fanfic possibilities will truly be endless then.

[Seto Kaiba]

The ginormous hangar capacities quoted for a lot of the ships make no sense, and neither does a lot of the things we see in Macross City during the TV series and DYRL. A stadium? Seriously, what component of the - need I remind you - 1,200 meter long SDF-1 is big enough that you could build a stadium inside it, with plenty of space above and around it? Even the legs aren't wide enough for that.

I'd go on at great length about the impossibility of the official specs of the ARMD-L (it's smaller than a WW2 Essex! And it's supposed to have an air wing the size of a Cold War Nimitz class? All carried internally? When half the hangar would need to be double height due to Pixie Squadron and Rabbit 1? Who came up with these numbers...) and the absurdity of the Monster on the Asuka II (it's taller than the ship is, from the waterline to the flight deck...), but it wouldn't be good for my blood pressure... so I'll just go with the assumption I just came up with: one of the most common applications of Super Dimension Technology is making things bigger on the inside, and the tech is so subtle you don't even notice when you're passing into a "compressed" area...

It's funny that this comes up as often as it does... but a lot of fans who point of scale problems in Macross often don't have a good grasp of just how HUGE some of these ships really are.

I suppose it's hardly surprising, given that most people will never live or work anywhere near something as large as a modern supercarrier... let alone fully appreciate just how vast something like that can be. Many also overestimate the size of the internal features inside ships like the Macross, by relating them to venues in modern cities designed for much larger populations. I'm unusually lucky in this regard, since the office I work in has a footprint not too far off the size of a Macross-class ship in terms of square footage, which makes a great metric for comparison. (The PR blokes brag that it's the second-largest building in the US for internal floor space under one roof, behind the Pentagon). There is a certain amount of artistic license involved in the Macross's internal spaces, but it's nowhere remotely near the level its critics usually claim, except perhaps on the TV series version of the Macross's internal city.

The auditorium we see in the original Macross series and the Macross: Do You Remember Love? movie is no Madison Square Garden. It can't be more than maybe 61m in diameter, based on the size of its stage, and it's clearly less than half that in height. At that size (roughly half of Madison Square Garden), it'd still be able to hold over two thousand people in relative comfort, and fit neatly into either of the Macross's legs. Based on the available official cutaways, the auditorium is more like 40-50m in diameter, which would still comfortably allow it to seat close to a thousand, which wouldn't be at all unreasonably for a community of approximately 50,000. (We've got two auditoriums on close to that scale in this building, and I can assure you either one would fit neatly into the footprint of one of the Macross's legs.)

The Macross Quarter-class's ARMD-L is a hair under 200m long, and has a maximum capacity of approximately 80 aircraft... roughly equivalent to the typical (but nowhere near maximum) capacity of the Nimitz-class, but with a tiny fraction of the crew. It's indicated in official sources that the vast majority of the hangar is NOT sized to accommodate large craft like a Queadluun-Rhea or Konig Monster, and that those are kept in a small, separate portion of the hangar with greater vertical clearance (which also doubles as maintenance space since battle suits take up very little horizontal floorspace). The hangar wasn't designed to take such large craft as the Konig Monster, so it has to be stored with its wings folded up to fit. (It's also worth noting that they're not strictly limited to just using the hangar floor thanks to gravity control...)

Can't say I see any problem with the Monster on the Asuka II myself... it's big, but it's not exactly inclined to high-speed maneuvering.

Edited June 22, 2016 by Seto Kaiba

[SebastianP]

It's funny that this comes up as often as it does... but a lot of fans who point of scale problems in Macross often don't have a good grasp of just how HUGE some of these ships really are.

I suppose it's hardly surprising, given that most people will never live or work anywhere near something as large as a modern supercarrier... let alone fully appreciate just how vast something like that can be. Many also overestimate the size of the internal features inside ships like the Macross, by relating them to venues in modern cities designed for much larger populations. I'm unusually lucky in this regard, since the office I work in has a footprint not too far off the size of a Macross-class ship in terms of square footage, which makes a great metric for comparison. (The PR blokes brag that it's the second-largest building in the US for internal floor space under one roof, behind the Pentagon). There is a certain amount of artistic license involved in the Macross's internal spaces, but it's nowhere remotely near the level its critics usually claim, except perhaps on the TV series version of the Macross's internal city.

The auditorium we see in the original Macross series and the Macross: Do You Remember Love? movie is no Madison Square Garden. It can't be more than maybe 61m in diameter, based on the size of its stage, and it's clearly less than half that in height. At that size (roughly half of Madison Square Garden), it'd still be able to hold over two thousand people in relative comfort, and fit neatly into either of the Macross's legs. Based on the available official cutaways, the auditorium is more like 40-50m in diameter, which would still comfortably allow it to seat close to a thousand, which wouldn't be at all unreasonably for a community of approximately 50,000. (We've got two auditoriums on close to that scale in this building, and I can assure you either one would fit neatly into the footprint of one of the Macross's legs.)

The Macross Quarter-class's ARMD-L is a hair under 200m long, and has a maximum capacity of approximately 80 aircraft... roughly equivalent to the typical (but nowhere near maximum) capacity of the Nimitz-class, but with a tiny fraction of the crew. It's indicated in official sources that the vast majority of the hangar is NOT sized to accommodate large craft like a Queadluun-Rhea or Konig Monster, and that those are kept in a small, separate portion of the hangar with greater vertical clearance (which also doubles as maintenance space since battle suits take up very little horizontal floorspace). The hangar wasn't designed to take such large craft as the Konig Monster, so it has to be stored with its wings folded up to fit. (It's also worth noting that they're not strictly limited to just using the hangar floor thanks to gravity control...)

Can't say I see any problem with the Monster on the Asuka II myself... it's big, but it's not exactly inclined to high-speed maneuvering.

You do know that the physical dimensions of the Nimitz-class hangar bay are known, right? And that it's trivially easy to literally puzzle out how many aircraft of various types you can fit inside using aircraft silhouettes? The actual hangar capacity of a Nimitz-class carrier is less than 40 fighters - during the Tomcat era, less than *thirty*, according to the official US Navy briefing on fire safety I just downloaded. The rest of the air wing - two thirds of it! - had to be parked on deck or kept in the air, because there simply is no room for more aircraft below the flight deck.

Someone doing a fan-made RPG book (I think it's an RPG book at least, the doujin circle in question publishes a lot of stuff for a game called Five Star Stories) about Macross ships took the known size of the ARMD-L, made some generous guesses as to the extent of the hangar, and worked out how many fighters would physically fit inside those spaces, just like people have been doing for real world carriers. The conclusion they came up with was that the forward hangar where most of the VFs are stored has a total capacity of *thirteen* VF-25s. The aft hangar, which is the double-height bit, has what looks like enough space for the König Monster, the three Queadlunn's, and seven standing VF-25 Battroids, if I'm reading the diagram they made correctly.

Note that the hangar spaces can't be larger than depicted, because the ship isn't big enough. They also probably can't be made half-height to fit in more fighters, because the VF-25 is too tall in fighter mode; it's definitely too tall if it's got Super, Armored or Tornado parts on.

Now you can say this is doujin material and not official, but the diagrams were made using the official dimensions, and they're really really generous given that there's no room for a power plant unless it's in the forward section in between the Destroid hatches, nor any propulsion system (I really need some pictures of the underside of the DX toy's ARMD-L to see if there are any engines on it...), and no matter how you slice it you cannot physically fit in more VF-25s than this inside the hull dimensions and hull shape that we've been given.

And I'm fairly certain that the SMS isn't using the US Navy method of expanding your air wing and storing the planes on the deck, because we never actually see them do this - and the deck isn't much larger than a Nimitz-class hangar deck anyway, being somewhat shorter and only a little wider, and only for part of the way at that, so you couldn't park any awesome numbers of fighters there anyway.

The same picture, by the by, also shows the kind of modifications that would be necessary to fit thirty-seven fighters inside a Northampton-class, and while it can physically be done, it basically wouldn't have any interior to speak of left.

I'm not sure whether the authors did this for any other ships, such as the ARMDs or the Prometheus, since I don't have the book itself, just six pages of official thumbnail previews.

If you still think the ARMD-L can carry 80 fighters, then show me how...

[Seto Kaiba]

Someone doing a fan-made RPG book (I think it's an RPG book at least, the doujin circle in question publishes a lot of stuff for a game called Five Star Stories) about Macross ships took the known size of the ARMD-L, made some generous guesses as to the extent of the hangar, and worked out how many fighters would physically fit inside those spaces, just like people have been doing for real world carriers. The conclusion they came up with was that the forward hangar where most of the VFs are stored has a total capacity of *thirteen* VF-25s. The aft hangar, which is the double-height bit, has what looks like enough space for the König Monster, the three Queadlunn's, and seven standing VF-25 Battroids, if I'm reading the diagram they made correctly.

Books, plural... there are at least three that I'm aware of. I managed to obtain copies of them a while back thanks to the assistance of some very helpful and generous MacrossWorld-ers.

They're not RPG books, though... they're "reference dojinshi" (effectively, fan-made technical manuals). I've only translated bits and pieces here and there, since we were more interested in the art when we first obtained them, but I found them to be reasonably well-written. They take a fair few liberties, invented a few new ship classes of their own, and missed some details from the shows themselves, but on balance it makes for an interesting read and good material if you happen to be finessing your own homebrew Macross RPG stats.

... and you're not familiar with the Five Star Stories? Boy are YOU missing out. That's a long-running science fantasy manga series by Mamoru Nagano, whose work you may also be familiar with from Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, Heavy Metal L-Gaim, Brain Powered, and the Tekken game series. It recently celebrated its 30th anniversary, and is currently being serialized in Newtype magazine. If "bullet time Jedi with giant robots in a feudalistic spacefuture" sounds like your kind of thing, message me and I'll point you in the right direction.

And I'm fairly certain that the SMS isn't using the US Navy method of expanding your air wing and storing the planes on the deck, because we never actually see them do this - and the deck isn't much larger than a Nimitz-class hangar deck anyway, being somewhat shorter and only a little wider, and only for part of the way at that, so you couldn't park any awesome numbers of fighters there anyway.

... aaaaaaaactually, we do see them do this on a few occasions in the Macross Frontier series. It's a "blink and you'll miss it" thing, but it does happen. I'll get you a screen capture later later today.

(It is, however, worth remembering that the 80 mecha maximum capacity is the number given for the Macross Quarter as a whole, not just ARMD-L... and that a fair number of those 80 mecha are Cheyenne II destroids that are stored elsewhere.)

Edited June 23, 2016 by Seto Kaiba

[SebastianP]

Books, plural... there are at least three that I'm aware of. I managed to obtain copies of them a while back thanks to the assistance of some very helpful and generous MacrossWorld-ers.

They're not RPG books, though... they're "reference dojinshi" (effectively, fan-made technical manuals). I've only translated bits and pieces here and there, since we were more interested in the art when we first obtained them, but I found them to be reasonably well-written. They take a fair few liberties, invented a few new ship classes of their own, and missed some details from the shows themselves, but on balance it makes for an interesting read and good material if you happen to be finessing your own homebrew Macross RPG stats.

... and you're not familiar with the Five Star Stories? Boy are YOU missing out. That's a long-running science fantasy manga series by Mamoru Nagano, whose work you may also be familiar with from Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, Heavy Metal L-Gaim, Brain Powered, and the Tekken game series. It recently celebrated its 30th anniversary, and is currently being serialized in Newtype magazine. If "bullet time Jedi with giant robots in a feudalistic spacefuture" sounds like your kind of thing, message me and I'll point you in the right direction.

... aaaaaaaactually, we do see them do this on a few occasions in the Macross Frontier series. It's a "blink and you'll miss it" thing, but it does happen. I'll get you a screen capture later later today.

(It is, however, worth remembering that the 80 mecha maximum capacity is the number given for the Macross Quarter as a whole, not just ARMD-L... and that a fair number of those 80 mecha are Cheyenne II destroids that are stored elsewhere.)

Thanks for the correction regarding the books, the site didn't really machine translate very well at all so it was hard to tell what was going on. I know one the things they apparently do *is* a Five Star Stories RPG, because one of the other "look what we make" pages literally says "Five Star Stories RPG".

I've posted a request in a few places for pictures of the underside of the ARMD-L section of the DX Chogokin toy, because while I was looking for existing pictures I saw something that makes it look like that rear hangar the doujin is talking about is an open void with no back and no bottom on the actual ship, as that's where the Quarter's arm goes...

Things would be so much easier for everyone if the ships were double their given size.

[Seto Kaiba]

I've posted a request in a few places for pictures of the underside of the ARMD-L section of the DX Chogokin toy, because while I was looking for existing pictures I saw something that makes it look like that rear hangar the doujin is talking about is an open void with no back and no bottom on the actual ship, as that's where the Quarter's arm goes...

I should be able to oblige you on that front. I have the DX Chogokin toy, though it's stashed away in a closet since it's too damned big to fit in the display case I have.

[crazysteve]

If Heinz's singing triggers the var, why doesn't the NUNS just issue earplugs to all those cannon fodder pilots? With so much sound based weaponry being used on both sides I imagine the simplest precaution would be some good noise cancelling headphones. A deaf pilot squadron in Macross would be the unbeatable team.

[BChoinski]

If Heinz's singing triggers the var, why doesn't the NUNS just issue earplugs to all those cannon fodder pilots? With so much sound based weaponry being used on both sides I imagine the simplest precaution would be some good noise cancelling headphones. A deaf pilot squadron in Macross would be the unbeatable team.

I think the problem is that it's not just sound, it's super-dimensional waves. A means of shielding the cockpits from those waves would be needed.

[Nazareno2012]

I think the problem is that it's not just sound, it's super-dimensional waves. A means of shielding the cockpits from those waves would be needed.

Why not jam them like what they did to the Vajra fold waves in Frontier? If Chuck's VF-31E has EW systems equivalent to Luca's RVF-25, then it could be done.

[Seto Kaiba]

I think the problem is that it's not just sound, it's super-dimensional waves. A means of shielding the cockpits from those waves would be needed.

Why not jam them like what they did to the Vajra fold waves in Frontier? If Chuck's VF-31E has EW systems equivalent to Luca's RVF-25, then it could be done.

... that is an excellent question.

I'd assume that they would ordinarily be able to, if only Heinz were not using that Protoculture artifact and the associated shrine and ruins to mechanically amplify his already-formidable fold receptor factor to overpowering levels.

(Essentially, I'm guessing he's transmitting as such a high power that jamming it with Chuck's fold-wave radar would be like trying to jam a radio station with a cell phone.)

[camk4evr]

... that is an excellent question.

I'd assume that they would ordinarily be able to, if only Heinz were not using that Protoculture artifact and the associated shrine and ruins to mechanically amplify his already-formidable fold receptor factor to overpowering levels.

(Essentially, I'm guessing he's transmitting as such a high power that jamming it with Chuck's fold-wave radar would be like trying to jam a radio station with a cell phone.)

Another problem with that is that it, even if they weren't using the protoculture ruins) would jam Walkure as well which is an issue since the Windermeans start their attacks by triggering a var outbreak which means that NUNS would have to fight their own, out of control, forces (bad for morale) as well as the Windereans.