Super Macross Mecha Fun Time Discussion Thread!

[TG Remix]

11 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

"Varying levels of success" in that case still being single digit numbers of one-off test units that never made it to mass production.  I think the single largest lot mentioned was the six Zeta Plus A1s that were delivered to Karaba, and most of those were subsequently converted into one-offs.

The Model Graphix issue of January 1989 seems to infer there was much more. Those six were from A2 types that were converted from A1 types, and twenty of those were said to be delivered to Karaba. Granted the few B types were also said to be converted from A types as well, but those aren't too bad numbers all things considered, especially when we don't know anything about how many C Types were built too.

 

11 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

(I think the only UC title where Gundams are truly mass-produced as a main MS is Victory... and even that is watered down a bit subsequently.)

If that's referring to the Victory Hexa the only difference it states is the head, otherwise it's almost identical to the original. The Victory MSV states that 20 of the original were built, but I'm assuming those are referring to the Core Fighters considering how much the limbs are considered expendable to Uso, lol.

 

11 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

I'm not surprised we haven't gotten to see a stock VF-24 directly in the animation.  After all, the Central NUNS are basically the Biggest Stick.  Exactly what they get up to is never specified, but they apparently don't get involved in tiffs between emigrant governments because their bad behavior in the Second Unification Wars (Macross VF-X2) led to major reforms that put them on a much shorter leash and prevents them from interfering in politically difficult conflicts like that.  The few times we've seen representatives of a central New UN Forces unit they've basically been Power Overwhelming.  Colonel Todo's VF-X Special Forces unit more or less took over an entire planet with a single squadron and an extremely well-executed Bavarian fire drill.  Cromwell went off the radar with a single Battle-class and, after picking up some next-gen unmanned fighters, essentially took over an entire star cluster in just days with a single ship.

Considering the last time we saw them in animation was in Plus with their massive orbital defense, it's a amazing if not too surprising thing to consider that Earth and the Central UN as a whole are kinda broken in terms of military prowess. If not a stock VF-24, then it's more likely to see more detuned ones that were made from the YF-24 Evolution data that was sent to the colony fleets, to begin with. Though considering Cromwell's Battle Astresea, makes me wonder if a NUNS force can have a Macross-type carrier be built not tied to an emigration fleet as a flagship or something of the likes of that.

 

11 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Quite a few of the parts are said to have been custom-machined to Mylene's request by the an ultra-high end luxury car company.

Would make sense. Pretty much every other instance of a VF-11 having a pinpoint barrier (like the Jamming Bird's VF-11D Customs and VF-11C Thunderbolt Interceptor) seems to be custom fitted instead of any standard upgrade. Though personally, it would complement its relatively large shield a bit if implemented in a life extension program.

 

10 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

Right? The "super enhancement" on those mechs are the ones in the pilot's seat.

I like your thinking, although we need to be careful else the Macross Galaxy takes that too literally!

[Seto Kaiba]

2 hours ago, TG Remix said:

The Model Graphix issue of January 1989 seems to infer there was much more. Those six were from A2 types that were converted from A1 types, and twenty of those were said to be delivered to Karaba. Granted the few B types were also said to be converted from A types as well, but those aren't too bad numbers all things considered, especially when we don't know anything about how many C Types were built too.

From what I can see in newer sources (e.g. Master Archive), the ~20 trial production Zeta Plus units that were delivered to Karaba make up the majority of the production volume and several of those units were broken up for parts instead of being used due to lack of spares.

(Considering how often its many configurations are said to have been unsuitable for mass production for cost reasons, or SO unsuitable for mass production due to cost that they were never actually built... it seems unlikely that it was ever truly a production model until the simplified ReGZ and ReZEL.)

 

2 hours ago, TG Remix said:

If that's referring to the Victory Hexa the only difference it states is the head, otherwise it's almost identical to the original. The Victory MSV states that 20 of the original were built, but I'm assuming those are referring to the Core Fighters considering how much the limbs are considered expendable to Uso, lol.

I was actually thinking of the simplified GUN-EZ mass production model... I completely forgot the Hexa exists.

 

2 hours ago, TG Remix said:

Considering the last time we saw them in animation was in Plus with their massive orbital defense, it's a amazing if not too surprising thing to consider that Earth and the Central UN as a whole are kinda broken in terms of military prowess. If not a stock VF-24, then it's more likely to see more detuned ones that were made from the YF-24 Evolution data that was sent to the colony fleets, to begin with. Though considering Cromwell's Battle Astresea, makes me wonder if a NUNS force can have a Macross-type carrier be built not tied to an emigration fleet as a flagship or something of the likes of that.

Earth's substantial military prowess owes a lot to Earth's massive technological and industrial base.

Not only is Earth home to the headquarters/head offices of many of the megacorporations on the bleeding edge of military and civilian technological development, it possesses (as far as we know) the single greatest concentration of manufacturing capacity anywhere outside of a Zentradi main fleet.  The Sol system is home to more than twenty factory satellites seized from the Zentradi Boddole Zer main fleet in 2010-2011.  Even one factory satellite is a gargantuan amount of manufacturing power, and most emigrant planets and fleets don't even have that and make do with Human-built automated or conventional factories.  It's how they were able to build these massive emigrant fleets so fast.

To date, I believe we've had mention of two independent Battle-class ships used by the Earth and/or central New UN Forces.  The Macross 13/Battle 13 that appears in Macross Frontier's novelizations as a not-so-secret defense flagship of the Earth New UN Forces under the command of General Kim Kabirov, and the Battle Astraea that belonged to the NUNS 7th Fleet before its commander (Cromwell) went rogue and disguised the theft of the ship as a fold accident.  Battle-class ships are rare, with most fleets having only the one, and independent Battle-class ships seem to be a recent introduction in the 2050s.  (Esp. given some accounts like the non-official Spica Shock where the central NUNS had borrowed the newly completed Battle 7 instead.)

 

2 hours ago, TG Remix said:

Would make sense. Pretty much every other instance of a VF-11 having a pinpoint barrier (like the Jamming Bird's VF-11D Customs and VF-11C Thunderbolt Interceptor) seems to be custom fitted instead of any standard upgrade. Though personally, it would complement its relatively large shield a bit if implemented in a life extension program.

It'd mean upgrading the VF-11's engines, since the thermonuclear reaction burst turbine's greater output seems to be required to meet the power demand of the barrier.

 

2 hours ago, TG Remix said:

I like your thinking, although we need to be careful else the Macross Galaxy takes that too literally!

Wouldn't be the first time... after all, the ancient Protoculture's solution to the Zentradi struggling with the Queadluun-series battle suits wasn't to scale down the suit's performance, it was to build a better pilot!

[DownIsUp]

Do we know if any Sv-51s or -52s sortied against Vf-1 Valkyries? I assume most of them had been packed up by UNS forces prior to the Vf-1's rollout but I wasn't sure

[Uxi]

6 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

 

To date, I believe we've had mention of two independent Battle-class ships used by the Earth and/or central New UN Forces.  The Macross 13/Battle 13 that appears in Macross Frontier's novelizations as a not-so-secret defense flagship of the Earth New UN Forces under the command of General Kim Kabirov, and the Battle Astraea that belonged to the NUNS 7th Fleet before its commander (Cromwell) went rogue and disguised the theft of the ship as a fold accident.  Battle-class ships are rare, with most fleets having only the one, and independent Battle-class ships seem to be a recent introduction in the 2050s.  (Esp. given some accounts like the non-official Spica Shock where the central NUNS had borrowed the newly completed Battle 7 instead.)

Wasn't I reading somewhere that Battle Astrea was thought to be salvaged from Battle 21 aka Battle Galaxy after it was destroyed by either Battle 25 Frontier (Mac Frontier series) or the Vajra (movie version)? 

[Seto Kaiba]

11 minutes ago, Uxi said:

Wasn't I reading somewhere that Battle Astrea was thought to be salvaged from Battle 21 aka Battle Galaxy after it was destroyed by either Battle 25 Frontier (Mac Frontier series) or the Vajra (movie version)? 

Oh, yeah... that was a theory about the Battle Astraea that was discussed here and elsewhere when promotional material for the movie gave us our first look the film's mechanical designs.  Since it was obvious at a glance that the Battle Astraea was a reuse of the Battle Galaxy CG model from Macross Frontier's TV series with fairly minimal modifications, a bit of pre-release speculation was that the anti-government organization Heimdall might've taken the wreck of the Battle Galaxy and restored it to use as their flagship.

When the film came out, that theory was jossed and we learned that Battle Astraea was a completely separate and unrelated ship that Cromwell commanded in the NUNS 7th Fleet before he went rogue to hunt Lady M.  He and his crew disappeared with the ship and its disappearance was eventually written off as a fold accident before she reappeared with a bunch of new upgrades as the flagship of the anti-government organization Heimdall.

 

 

2 hours ago, DownIsUp said:

Do we know if any Sv-51s or -52s sortied against Vf-1 Valkyries? I assume most of them had been packed up by UNS forces prior to the Vf-1's rollout but I wasn't sure

The first VF-1 Valkyries entered military service at the very end of November 2008.  They effectively missed the "official" end of the Unification Wars in 2007 and the de facto end of the Unification Wars in 2008.  

Outside of video games like Macross 30 where much of the franchise's "back catalog" of mecha are up for grabs, I can think of two very specific cases where a VF-1 is said to have encountered a SV-51 in combat:

The first is in the sixth and final volume of the incomplete manga Macross the First.  The flashback arc of the manga depicts a never-before-mentioned fourth defensive battle of South Ataria Island on Christmas Eve 2008.  Anti-Unification Alliance remnants basically carried out a suicide attack on the island as a distraction for an experimental unmanned SV-51 to take out the SDF-1 Macross and the island itself with a thermonuclear reaction bomb.  Most of the VFs used in that battle were VF-0's from the Asuka II's sister ship Graf Zeppelin II, but partway through the battle Roy sorties in his newly issued VF-1 to intercept the enemy leader.

The second is a passing mention in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-0 Phoenix that completely ignores the above.  In the story section SV-51's Final Air Battle starting on page 107, the final paragraphs describe a "distant finale" in the following year where an Alliance pilot named Kilis Dakurd who'd defected to the UN Forces after being defeated in the battle in the main section of the narrative scored the last known confirmed kill of an SV-51 in air combat.  He had been assigned to a VF-1 squadron based at Grand Cannon III in Africa and in June 2009 a badly maintained SV-51 attacked his unit and was easily shot down by Dakurd.  His after-action report noted that the SV-51 was in no shape to sustain combat and looked like it was looking for a place to die.  Dakurd is noted to be one of the few pilots to have scored against both a VF-0 and a SV-51.  

[Big s]

23 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

The only one to actually reach true mass production was, IIRC, the ReZEL... which is not even really a Zeta Gundam derivative.  It's a tarted up ReGZ, which was another overpriced flop that saw only a tiny number of demonstrators produced despite basically being the GM version of the Zeta 1.

I always thought it was a production version of the Methus. They both have a lot of similarities and both transform into piles of crap

[aurance]

Pretty much any transforming in Gundam is half-assed.

[pengbuzz]

5 hours ago, aurance said:

Pretty much any transforming in Gundam is half-assed.

With all respect, the Zeta would hand most valks a butt-whooping unequalled in mech combat.

[Seto Kaiba]

14 hours ago, Big s said:

I always thought it was a production version of the Methus. They both have a lot of similarities and both transform into piles of crap

Kinda... according to Yutaka Izubuchi, who based the ReGZ on Koichi Ohata's earlier designs for a mass produced Zeta Gundam, the ReGZ is a simplified Zeta Gundam with the transformation system cut out, and the ReZEL developed from it is basically the ReGZ plus the Methuss's transformation system.

 

8 hours ago, aurance said:

Pretty much any transforming in Gundam is half-assed.

I dunno, I think the Zeta's transformation is pretty good... and it was heavily inspired by Macross's VF-1 Valkyrie.

A lot of the other transformations are pretty underwhelming, true.  Transformation design is hard, and there aren't many designers who can really do it well like Kawamori.

It really is impressive just how influential the VF-1 Valkyrie proved to be.  The 10th Anniversary feature in B-Club that talks about all the different mecha anime that credit Macross as an inspiration is basically a who's who of late 80's and early 90's mecha anime.

[Big s]

8 hours ago, aurance said:

Pretty much any transforming in Gundam is half-assed.

Sometimes they’re full assed, like the lower part of the ZZ

 

3 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

With all respect, the Zeta would hand most valks a butt-whooping unequalled in mech combat.

I do like the zeta and its lineage for the most part. It is tough for me to think of other great examples.

as far as a fight against a Valkyrie, that’s a bit tough since the zeta had a newtype pilot, but if you got the right A-hole pilot in a well armed Valkyrie he’d just have to keep reminding the Zeta’s pilot that he’s named after a girl and then unleash a barrage of reaction missiles 

[Big s]

3 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Kinda... according to Yutaka Izubuchi, who based the ReGZ on Koichi Ohata's earlier designs for a mass produced Zeta Gundam, the ReGZ is a simplified Zeta Gundam with the transformation system cut out, and the ReZEL developed from it is basically the ReGZ plus the Methuss's transformation system.

I still don’t see really anything from the ReGZ in the ReZel design at all. 

[azrael]

48 minutes ago, Big s said:

I still don’t see really anything from the ReGZ in the ReZel design at all. 

Think of it as if ReGZ and Methuss had a kid. ReZEL (Which literally stands for Refine Zeta Gundam Escort Leader) has all the refinements of ReGZ (weapons loadout plus a fully laid out MS vs Methuss's janky MS design) married to Methuss' transformation.

[Seto Kaiba]

5 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

With all respect, the Zeta would hand most valks a butt-whooping unequalled in mech combat.

Of course, one always has to be careful drawing comparisons between different fictional settings because so much is often left deliberately vague and subjective assessments of performance depend heavily on the quality of the enemies in the series and their tech level.  Valid comparisons can only really be drawn where there are objective measures of any given design's capabilities... and there are certain settings that are simply SO over-the-top that any comparison becomes a bit silly.

I will explain in detail why this is silly in a spoiler tag so nobody has to wade through my ranting if they don't explicitly make a choice to do so.

Spoiler

Macross is one of those settings, TBH.  It's a near-future setting like many other mecha anime titles and it certainly looks like it's "15 minutes into the future" most of the time, but Humanity skipped centuries if not millennia of technological progress thanks to the overtechnology of Alien Starship-1 and the many other examples of Zentradi and Protoculture technology they've acquired since.  In the space of just a few years, Macross's Earth went from flying the occasional combustion rocket up to a space station in orbit for scientific research to having permanent bases on the Moon and Mars and over a hundred interplanetary spaceships with artificial gravity, energy weapons, and all kinds of other sci-fi tech.  It operates on a frankly bonkers level of power compared to most other "real robot" type mecha anime.

Gundam in general, and especially its Universal Century timeline, is a lot more grounded and near-future technologically because Humanity didn't have any shortcuts or cheats to obtain the technology to build things like space colonies, permanent settlements on the moon, and giant robots.  That was the product of literal decades of patient research and innovation, so despite being set much farther into the future than Macross was the technology is much less advanced because it's a logical extension of real world tech.  They're building real world space habitat concepts like the Stanford Torus and O'Neill Cylinder space colonies instead of sci-fi space stations with artificial gravity.  They're using various forms of thermonuclear propulsion, but it's a mix of Project Orion-esque pulsed nuclear thrusters and reactor-heated thermal rockets instead of something like an impulse drive.  The easiest place to spot it is in energy outputs, though... 

 

In Gundam, and particularly the Universal Century, a megawatt (1,000 kilowatts) is a LOT of energy.  It's a lot of energy by modern standards too.  750W is a reasonable idle power draw for a residential home in the American midwest this time of year.  It can spike as high as 3-4,000W if you're running your dishwasher and washing machine and air conditioner all at once.  The MS-06C/F Zaku II's compact thermonuclear reactor produces 976kW, or enough electricity to power about 244 houses that are all running their most energy-intensive appliances simultaneously or around 1,300 homes at the idle level.  The RX-78-2 Gundam's compact thermonuclear reactor was rated for a lot more power at 1,380kW.  The MSZ-006 Zeta Gundam's tops out at 2,020kW... enough to power almost 2,700 homes at idle or over 500 at peak.

In Macross, a megawatt is not very much power at all.  Each of the VF-1 Valkyrie's two compact thermonuclear reactors is rated for 650,000kW (650 megawatts), for a total output of 1,300,000kW (1,300 megawatts, or 1.3 gigawatts).  That's 1,332x the output of the MS-06C/F Zaku II, 942x the output of the RX-78-2 Gundam, and 643x the output of the MSZ-006 Zeta Gundam.  That's enough juice to power 1.733 million homes at idle or 325,000 homes at peak demand as above.

You see this same dichotomy in energy weapons.  The original beam rifle used by the RX-78-2 Gundam has an output of 1,900kW (1.9MW), and the beam spray guns which were built for the GM are rated for between 1,400kW and 1,500kW depending on model.  This is explicitly and repeatedly said to be capital ship-grade firepower.  The Zeta Gundam's beam rifle is rated for 5,700kW.  

The VF-1 Valkyrie's coaxial laser cannons, which depending on variant it can have anywhere from one to four of on the monitor turret, have a rated output of 5,000kW each.  The lightest, lowest-output energy weapon the VF-1 can carry has 2.5x the peak output of the original Gundam's heaviest weapon and only slightly less than the Zeta's own heavy beam rifle.  The SF-3A Lancer II carries a pair of beam cannons rated for 750,000kW each... around 131x the firepower of the Zeta Gundam's boomstick per cannon, and it's got two.  Later beam weapons in Macross like the VF-1's Strike pack cannon are said to have outputs of tens or dozens of megawatts and the later beam gunpods likely cross the line into hundreds considering the first few examples require dedicated reactors to operate.

Drawing comparisons between different franchises with vastly different worldviews and concepts of scale is going to yield pretty silly and often one-sided results even when there's objective data for comparison.

(Thankfully it's not as bad as, say, trying to compare to Five Star Stories where the tech level is bonkers enough to have semi-perpetual motion generators producing petawatt-levels of power and beam weapons able to destroy planets carried by regular mecha.)

Edited Wednesday at 05:42 PM by Seto Kaiba

[aurance]

7 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

With all respect, the Zeta would hand most valks a butt-whooping unequalled in mech combat.

I have no idea how they would perform against each other - it's not particularly relevant or interesting. I was referring to design: how good-looking both forms are, and the smoothness of the transformation process.

[aurance]

3 hours ago, Big s said:

Sometimes they’re full assed, like the lower part of the ZZ

Kinda. It's a lot of engineering for a pair of legs to turn into a different looking blob.

[pengbuzz]

1 hour ago, aurance said:

I have no idea how they would perform against each other - it's not particularly relevant or interesting. I was referring to design: how good-looking both forms are, and the smoothness of the transformation process.

Ah, okay.

[Big s]

3 hours ago, azrael said:

Think of it as if ReGZ and Methuss had a kid. ReZEL (Which literally stands for Refine Zeta Gundam Escort Leader) has all the refinements of ReGZ (weapons loadout plus a fully laid out MS vs Methuss's janky MS design) married to Methuss' transformation

If not for this discussion, I wouldn’t have known what the name meant. I really hadn’t cared about the naming in U.C. Gundam stuff since most were from awkward sound effects, like the Zaku or Dom. Or they’re some odd German translation or just named after flowers or something else of equal silliness.

 I just went with the assumption that in Unicorn, that the kid who first identified the ReZel as a zeta type transformable suit just was referring to project Zeta. And if I remember that included happy accidents like the Hyaku Shiki, the Methus and eventually the Zeta and a few other oddballs

[Big s]

2 minutes ago, pengbuzz said:

Ah, okay.

Personally I don’t mind the odd performance comparison in an oddball thread. Kind like the Enterprise vs Macross discussions. They’re all equally ridiculous, but an entertaining distraction 

[azrael]

51 minutes ago, Big s said:

And if I remember that included happy accidents like the Hyaku Shiki, the Methus and eventually the Zeta and a few other oddballs

Yes, we'll save that discussion for a Gundam forum or Gundam mech thread. But yes, Project Zeta produced many "happy little accidents" for Anaheim.