Super Macross Mecha Fun Time Discussion Thread!

[Knight26]

23 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Yeah, AFAIK the only legal issue that ever came of that was inconsistently reported.

The author of the fanart that they "appropriated" as their original take on the VF-1 made several contradictory claims regarding Titan Comics' use of his art... that they had either straight-up plagiarized his design, or that they had asked if they could use it and not told him it was for commercial purposes.  He claimed, on at least one occasion, that they had resolved the matter by cutting him a check.

I remember speaking to the guy directly after the whole affair began.  He was unaware, and checked his sales, sure enough the artist for the comic had bought the models to use and it was a commercial license (his mistake for not having made it non-commercial).  I will double check, but I think he eventually got credit and that was enough for him as he had already been paid for the model itself, no additional money came in.  He changed all further sales to non-commercial then pulled sales of the model entirely due to all the backlash he recieved.

[Seto Kaiba]

10 hours ago, Knight26 said:

I remember speaking to the guy directly after the whole affair began.  He was unaware, and checked his sales, sure enough the artist for the comic had bought the models to use and it was a commercial license (his mistake for not having made it non-commercial).  I will double check, but I think he eventually got credit and that was enough for him as he had already been paid for the model itself, no additional money came in.  He changed all further sales to non-commercial then pulled sales of the model entirely due to all the backlash he recieved.

Ah, yes... you weren't the only one.  I spoke to him as well.  He came to a number of different Facebook groups and fan sites and told several wildly different versions of his story, none of which lined up with each other and several of which were completely contradictory.  Even the Robotech fan pages dismissed him as an idiot or a crook and banned him.  IIRC he was pulling the design down because he was informed that commercializing a derivative work explicitly based on the Macross IP was prosecutable as copyright infringement.

[Seto Kaiba]

So... in a continuation of what I started here and here, I'm going to delve into Variable Fighter Master File: VF-31 Siegfried to see if I can't figure out what sets the /FC1 and /FC2 engine designs used by the YF-29, YF-30, VF-31 Siegfried Custom, and Sv-262 apart from the regular FF-3001.

One thing that's apparent is that the picture they used for the VF-31 Custom Siegfried's FF-3001/FC2 Stage IIC thermonuclear reaction turbine engine is almost exactly the same image used for the FF-3001A Stage II thermonuclear reaction turbine engine in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-25 Messiah.  

The hardware differences in the diagrams are fairly trivial.  You can see they've drawn the bypass on the FF-3001A/FC2 diagram while they left it out of the original FF-3001A diagram, and there are some propellant inlets (the L-shaped bits) in later engine stages that were either omitted for clarity or omitted from the design itself.  The rest is essentially identical but for the apparent misspelling of "GIC" and one of the GIC locations on the FF-3001A has been changed to "ISC Receiver".

Proceeding into the actual text... the first immediately noteworthy detail is that the sidebar definition of "GIC" (Gravity and Inertia Control system) has added a clarification about the "Glenn Effect" mentioned in previous descriptions of the HamiltonX-Ash4 power generation system (H-APGS).  It is, as I summarized in previous translations, the same principle as in real world thermoelectric converters (the Seebeck Effect) but applied to OTM superalloys.  They even explicitly mention the Seebeck Effect this time.  Apparently this new variation of the Seebeck Effect was discovered by a researcher named Steven Glenn, who worked at the Shinnakasu Heavy Industry New Materials Research Institute in 2020.

The first actual paragraph tells us nothing new... just that the FF-3001/FC1 is more or less a custom made engine specifically for the YF-29 and that the /FC2 version is essentially the productionized version of it.

The second paragraph has some meat on its bones... and it's more or less exactly what I suspected it'd be given the scarcity and substantial increase in power the engines displayed over the more production FF-3001A.  The Gravity and Inertia Control system uses the same ultra-high purity fold quartz that's used in the fold wave system instead of synthetic fold carbon, which allows it to link up to the fold wave system and have its performance boosted by an order of magnitude.  Part of the GIC system has been replaced by an Inertia Store Converter system (also synchronized to the fold wave system) to help stabilize the output.  Other than that, the only noted significant hardware change is that the gear reductions in the turbine stage's transmission (on the turbine shaft at the aft of the engine) were adjusted.  The fold wave system can also apparently assist with plasma confinement inside of the engine, reducing overall fuel consumption.

The third paragraph notes that, like previous designs, the bypass airflow is not used to save fuel but to cool the engine housing.  It also notes that the bypass airflow is pulled back into the engine and flash-heated as an "afterburner". 

The fourth paragraph confirms the earlier findings from previous books that the Stage II engines probably derive their name from the fact that they're basically two engines in one... a super-hot high-pressure turbine and a lower pressure turbine wrapped around it.  If I'm reading this right, it looks like this setup also uses the gravitational compaction of airflow from the previous-gen thermonuclear reaction burst turbine engines.  

The fifth just talks about the two-layer turbine structure described above, and the transmission that connects the outer low-temperature turbine with the inner high temperature one to ensure that adequate airflow through the engine is maintained.  It also mentions in passing the thermoelectric converter (H-APGS) and MHD generator inherited from the FF-3001A.

The sixth and final paragraph just talks about what we already know about thermonuclear reaction engines in general being able to operate as a turbofan jet engine, ramjet, scramjet, and plasma rocket.  It specifically notes that the switchover between operating modes is handled by the airframe control AI so that pilots won't have to think about it.

 

This definitely explains why the more powerful /FC1 and /FC2 engines didn't become the standard.  

Because they've replaced the fold carbon in the GIC with ultra-high purity fold quartz, adopted an ISC system that also uses fold quartz, and require a fold wave system which also requires large amounts of ultra-high purity fold quartz to draw out their full potential, widespread adoption is impractical due to excessive cost or downright impossible due to the lack of sufficient supplies of that ultra-pure fold quartz.  

This also explains why Windermere IV was able to field a main variable fighter using /FC2 engines.  Their planet is rich in fold quartz and without the New UN Government there to regulate mining of it they were free to extract enough to build a modest fleet of fighters with ISC, fold reheat systems, and /FC2 engines.

[Bolt]

I know this has been discussed before. Been scrolling through trying to find it. 
The YF-21 has obvious Queedluun design influences externally. But does it share any other design influences from the Zentradi/Meltran?

[Seto Kaiba]

4 hours ago, Bolt said:

I know this has been discussed before. Been scrolling through trying to find it. 
The YF-21 has obvious Queedluun design influences externally. But does it share any other design influences from the Zentradi/Meltran?

General Galaxy's development of the YF-21 was assisted significantly by technological insights gleaned from some other projects the company was working on in parallel:

• Restoration and refurbishment of the captured Quimeliquola automated factory satellite.
• Development of a New UN Forces reproduction of the Quimeliquola Queadluun-Rau battle suit (that became the Queadluun-Rhea of Macross Frontier).

That ended up inspiring the YF-21's Queadluun-like design, and it also adopted at least one system from the Queadluun-series battle suit: the Inertia Vector Control System.  You could call it the Protoculture's economized version of the inertia capacitor technology that humanity would independently reinvent as the Inertia Store Converter adopted on 5th Gen VFs.  Its capabilities were much less than the ISC since it used fold carbon instead of fold quartz, but as a result it could also be mass-produced even if it was very expensive to do so.

[Bolt]

Thank you amigo!

[Podtastic]

On 8/3/2020 at 8:01 AM, Seto Kaiba said:

That said, their stats for Zentradi ships tend towards the absurd because the writers of the RPGs seem to have no concept of the size of these ships relative to their crews.  They end up being given ridiculously massive crew sizes and mecha complements because the writers forget the individual crew members are 125x the size of a human being, making the ships 1/5 the relative size in every dimension if you're looking at them in human terms.  Relative to its crew, the largest regular Zentradi ship is only about 2/3 the size of the Macross relative to her miclone crew.

Perhaps, as with the mecha,  they should have made the ships much larger. What sizes should those ships be for the mecha/troop complement to be realistic?

Would storing troops in micronised stasis, and mecha in modular disassembled state, help at all?

 

[Seto Kaiba]

11 hours ago, Podtastic said:

Perhaps, as with the mecha,  they should have made the ships much larger. What sizes should those ships be for the mecha/troop complement to be realistic?

Eh... the writers at Palladium Books didn't intentionally change the physical dimensions for any of the ships or mecha in the Robotech RPG or Macross II RPG.  The various disparities in their work vs. the OSM's official numbers are almost exclusively due to either guessing wildly in the absence of official information (due to laziness or scarcity) or working with official information from Robotech that already contained errors thanks to contributions by fan "experts" who often misrepresented their headcanon as official information.  There's one very forgivable case in the Macross II RPG where they actually did do proper research but the source they found had a typo that they faithfully copied because it was the only source they had.

They'd have to be several times their official size to accommodate the tens of thousands of crew and thousands of mecha the RPG claims they should have... because those crew are five times the size of a human in all respects, and their space and resource needs scale accordingly.  Easier by far to keep the ships their official size and scale the crew and mecha complements down to match the numbers that can be extrapolated from the OSM.

 

11 hours ago, Podtastic said:

Would storing troops in micronised stasis, and mecha in modular disassembled state, help at all?

Not really, no... it'd just make the ships that much less efficient.

Micloning the troops and storing them in cold sleep would likely increase, rather than decrease, the burden on a ship's resources.  Not only are we talking about the additional space demands and energy/resource burdens to maintain a massive cold sleep system, we're also talking about the need for far more micloning systems and stored biomass to permit crew to repeatedly micloned and the additional energy/resource demands that imposes.  All of their equipment would still be stored, as would all the rations and so on needed to sustain operations.  All in all, it just slows down the ship's ability to respond to threats and greatly increases energy consumption snice you need to defrost and then enlarge crew to man the mecha and so on, with the potential medical consequences repeated cycles of cold sleep and micloning entail.

Battle pods are already about as space-efficient as they're going to get, too.  Disassembling them would just increase the amount of time it takes to get them battle-ready when the default "parked" posture of a Regult puts the "chin" between the feet, reducing the mecha's footprint considerably with the legs folded up against the body.  That also adds the risk that equipment could malfunction as a result of being reassembled improperly or in great haste.

The Mardook do have a slightly more space-efficient approach, since their off-duty Zentradi rest in pods that reinforce the Mardook's mind control instead of keeping them in bunk rooms and the like, but even that space savings isn't huge since the Mardook need special accommodation on their own ships due to being one-fifth the size of their Zentradi (and thus, prone to being stepped on).

[GabrielV]

On 8/6/2020 at 7:52 PM, sketchley said:

I think it's a little bit of both.  I think (don't quote me) the Palladium Robotech RPG gave an armour increase.

The first edition did not.  The only difference in the core variants were the number of head lasers and the D being a two seater.  They all had 250 MDC.

The Super VF got more MDC.  Robotech 1e treated that as a different fighter variant rather than purely as a regular fighter plus armor packs.  Any Super VF variant had 300 MDC.

There MAY have been a Rifter (Palladium Books's house magazine) article at some point with stats for "Skull One" where they gave it more MDC than the regular fighters, but I don't recall for sure.

I also don't know what they did with the 2e RPG.  I have a copy for completeness, but other that superficially accurizing the info, they made all the numbers far worse.  The 2e version of the game plays even less like like it should than the original.

The Savage Worlds and Strange Machine Games variants also treat all VF-1 variants as having the same armor.

So, I think it's purely a videogame thing.  

[Seto Kaiba]

Lots of interest in posts from last August all of the sudden, so...

LET'S DO THE TIME WARP AGAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIN!

 

38 minutes ago, GabrielV said:

I also don't know what they did with the 2e RPG.  I have a copy for completeness, but other that superficially accurizing the info, they made all the numbers far worse.  The 2e version of the game plays even less like like it should than the original.

The Robotech RPG 2nd Edition stuck much closer to the Macross OSM in that respect.

All variants of the VF-1 except for the "VF-1R" - a post-war variant broadly analogous to Macross's VF-1X - were given exactly the same stats except for variant-specific hardware like the differing number of coaxial laser cannons on the monitor turret and the VF-1S's enhanced communication system.  They also changed the way the Super Pack and Armored Pack stats worked, making them additional locational MDC.  The improved post-war variant got 20% better armor and 25% higher top speeds, but was otherwise identical.

 

38 minutes ago, GabrielV said:

So, I think it's purely a videogame thing.  

More or less.  The Robotech-ism in question - that the various variants of VF-1 Valkyrie from the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series all had different performance and different amounts of armor - was/is an idea they got from the game Robotech: Battlecry.  It was something the developers did to pad the game out so the different models of VF-1 would play differently.  The aforementioned "VF-1R" post-war variant was also something they came up with to pad the game out.

There are variants of the VF-1 Valkyrie in Macross with differing levels of performance, but that's attributed to production block improvements that were applied equally to all VF-1 variants during mass production and new modernization variants introduced after mass production ended like the VF-1X or Master File's VF-1P.  Like the 40% improvement in the maximum available engine output that occurred at Block 6 when overboost went from being double maximum power (200%) to double afterburner (240%), or the 30% improvement in maximum instantaneous thrust from the new model engine installed in the VF-1X+.

[Podtastic]

12 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

They'd have to be several times their official size to accommodate the tens of thousands of crew and thousands

If the Nupetiet-Vergnitz length were increased to 36 km rather than a mingy 4km, and all other dimensions in proportion, would it be able to house the troop and mecha complement?

I hate the notion of less troops and mecha/ship. In fact I would prefer more.

Would the coaxial heavy reaction quantum cannon (?) not also be much more powerful at this size? What exactly, if any, is the relationship between the fold drives and this weapon?

[JB0]

3 hours ago, Podtastic said:

I hate the notion of less troops and mecha/ship. In fact I would prefer more.

Then giant-size soldiers might not be for you.

[Master Dex]

8 hours ago, Podtastic said:

If the Nupetiet-Vergnitz length were increased to 36 km rather than a mingy 4km, and all other dimensions in proportion, would it be able to house the troop and mecha complement?

I hate the notion of less troops and mecha/ship. In fact I would prefer more.

Would the coaxial heavy reaction quantum cannon (?) not also be much more powerful at this size? What exactly, if any, is the relationship between the fold drives and this weapon?

I suspect the square cube law would disappoint you a bit heh.

Increasing the size of anything causes the mass to increase exponentially. You'd get more volume for sure but you'd also be a lot heavier and the power requirements would be substantially larger to move that mass, let alone operating a massively scaled up cannon which would require energy I'm not sure an appropriately sized power source for that kind of ship could operate. Just running the fold drive would need a charge longer than Macross Frontier's entire fleet I bet.

Ironically at that scale having non-giant soldiers would be better for mass savings lol. Of course the problems Seto outlined would still exist too. 

I think if you want to maximize troops, the easiest solution is more ships.. which might be why the Zentradi field fleets with so damn many actually.

[Seto Kaiba]

7 hours ago, Podtastic said:

If the Nupetiet-Vergnitz length were increased to 36 km rather than a mingy 4km, and all other dimensions in proportion, would it be able to house the troop and mecha complement?

Perhaps... but it would be a very bad idea.

 

7 hours ago, Podtastic said:

I hate the notion of less troops and mecha/ship. In fact I would prefer more.

As noted above, more would be a bad idea.

Why?  Because weapons that can sink even a large warship in a single hit are commonplace... and used to be even more so, back before the factory satellites producing thermonuclear reaction weaponry were lost.

For the ancient Protoculture, warfare in an era where large-scale super dimension energy cannons and thermonuclear reaction missiles meant a ship could easily be sunk in a single hit would have made large warships carrying tens of thousands of soldiers a profoundly unattractive idea.  Mobile Fortresses were large enough to repeatedly tank firepower that'd sink a ship of the line outright and their limited capacity for self-repair meant that they could reasonably get away with doing it every now and again, but they were so vast and the sheer size of them made them vulnerable to death by a thousand cuts from large numbers of smaller warships.  The obvious way to address that massive firepower for ships of the line was numbers.  By having many smaller ships with relatively small crew and mecha complements individually, losing a single ship or even a small group of ships meant less loss of manpower and materiel than losing a single super-massive battleship crewed by tens of thousands.  Especially since a ship the size you're talking about could still be sunk in just one clean hit by a ship a tiny fraction of its size.

 

7 hours ago, Podtastic said:

Would the coaxial heavy reaction quantum cannon (?) not also be much more powerful at this size? What exactly, if any, is the relationship between the fold drives and this weapon?

To a certain extent, though size is only relevant in terms of the gun's ability to collect heavy quanta... which is more a function of how much power the ship can generate.

[Master Dex]

Of course Seto covered the logistical reasons when I covered operational lol. Talk about flanking a topic lol.

[Seto Kaiba]

10 minutes ago, Master Dex said:

Of course Seto covered the logistical reasons when I covered operational lol. Talk about flanking a topic lol.

Yup... thermonuclear reaction weaponry is kind of a kingmaker in Macross.

It's a key reason the New UN Spacy can get away with being a numerically-inferior carrier-based force instead of a weight-of-numbers battleship-based force like the Zentradi.  When a single VF can carry enough thermonuclear reaction munitions to sink two or three Zentradi warships, they punch WAY above their weight class when the typical NUNS carrier has an aircraft complement of 60-75 VFs and a supercarrier like a Battle-class carries ten times that.

Knowing that the Zentradi and Supervision Army used to be armed with thermonuclear reaction weaponry also goes a long ways towards explaining how the Zentradi have lost two thousand main fleets in the last 500,000 years.

[twich]

So, here is a thought....in the teaser that we see, the supposed drone fighter that we see in the black and orange paint scheme with the 4 similar looking pods on it that Chuck and Mirage are seen firing at, if these are indeed thermonuclear reaction engines, why does a drone require 4 of them?  I know that drones are a fraction of the cost of a VF, and I know that they probably use older, cheaper engines in the design, but why have 4 of them?  We have only seen 4 or more engines on a handful of Kawamori's designs.  The VF-4, the VB-6, the VAB-2/FBz-99, the VF-27 and the YF-29.  Seems rather wasteful of resources to use 4 engines in a drone, unless it isn't a drone, and like the SV-262, the "cockpit" has no external viewports/windscreens.  I guess that we will find out later this year (I Hope), but I am hoping for a few new Variable Fighter designs for Macross Delta.

Twich

[JB0]

13 hours ago, Master Dex said:

Increasing the size of anything causes the mass to increase exponentially. You'd get more volume for sure but you'd also be a lot heavier and the power requirements would be substantially larger to move that mass, let alone operating a massively scaled up cannon which would require energy I'm not sure an appropriately sized power source for that kind of ship could operate. Just running the fold drive would need a charge longer than Macross Frontier's entire fleet I bet.

Bodol's 1.4 megameter flagship and the 3-megameter factory satellite were both capable of space folds on reasonably short time scales, so it seems the technology exists.

And I'd just like to note that science-fiction is missing out on a grand thing by typing phrases like "three thousand kilometers" when they could be saying "three megameters" instead.

 

 

On 2/9/2021 at 12:04 AM, Podtastic said:

Would storing troops in micronised stasis, and mecha in modular disassembled state, help at all?

Even ignoring all the other issues, shrinking giant soldiers to human size to save space doesn't really work out, since your ship still has to be large enough to accommodate all those soldiers and their equipment at full size once the operation begins. You need space for the troops to be upsized, space for the equipment to be assembled, space for gearing up, boarding vehicles, et cetera.

You can't just make a couple of them bigger, assemble a couple mechs, send them out, then repeat to limit your staging area space. You need the capability to rapidly launch large forces for both offensive and defensive purposes, so you need to be able to accommodate a large force of men and armament in their operational state.

[sketchley]

2 hours ago, twich said:

So, here is a thought....in the teaser that we see, the supposed drone fighter that we see in the black and orange paint scheme with the 4 similar looking pods on it that Chuck and Mirage are seen firing at, if these are indeed thermonuclear reaction engines, why does a drone require 4 of them?  I know that drones are a fraction of the cost of a VF, and I know that they probably use older, cheaper engines in the design, but why have 4 of them?  We have only seen 4 or more engines on a handful of Kawamori's designs.  The VF-4, the VB-6, the VAB-2/FBz-99, the VF-27 and the YF-29.  Seems rather wasteful of resources to use 4 engines in a drone, unless it isn't a drone, and like the SV-262, the "cockpit" has no external viewports/windscreens.  I guess that we will find out later this year (I Hope), but I am hoping for a few new Variable Fighter designs for Macross Delta.

Twich

Well, let's break that down a little bit:

• VF-4: has 6 engines—2 thermonuclear, 2 scramjet, 2 rocket boosters.
• VB-6: has 6 engines—2 thermonuclear, 4 plasma rocket engines
• VF-27 and YF-29: 2 main thermonuclear engines, 2 sub-thermonuclear engines
• FBz-99: 4 thermonuclear engines

Of those, the VF-4 and VB-6 don't count—the development era or the sheer bulk that has to be moved.  The VF-27 uses those sub-thermonuclear engines to help power its big, honking energy gun.  I can't remember the specifics for the YF-29, but I presume there are similar reasons.

The FBz-99 is the odd one out simply because it has 4 engines of equal performance.  Are they used for powering its extensive beam weapons (like the VF-27)?  When I get around to translating the Macross Chronicle sheet for it I'll have that answer.

 

Going back to your question: if those 4 pods on the drone are indeed thermonuclear engines, perhaps they're for the same reasons as the VF-27—to power multiple beam guns, or a single really big beam guns.  However, it's rare for Kawamori-san to equip a Valkyrie with an externally mounted thermonuclear engine.  So, it's more like they are additional mission-related equipment (multi-missile pods, reaction bombs, ECM gear, drop tanks, or merely cargo pods).

[sketchley]

2 hours ago, JB0 said:

And I'd just like to note that science-fiction is missing out on a grand thing by typing phrases like "three thousand kilometers" when they could be saying "three megameters" instead.

See, there's a problem with your 'logic'.  Everyone who uses metric on a daily basis (and that's like all of the world except for 3 countries) doesn't use it like that.

It's also confusing because, for example, a megabyte is 1,024 bytes, which is a different scale.  Perhaps you should be writing "1.4 Mm" and "3 Mm"?  Not only is it faster to type, you get to keep your 'grand thing'.

However, 0.0014 Gm and 0.003 Gm roll off the tongue much better—and you can channel Doc Brown, too!

[Podtastic]

16 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

 the Zentradi have lost two thousand main fleets in the last 500,000 years.

Are there any figures for the maximum total numbers of Zentraedi ships, mecha and troopers the Zentraedi had at the height of their power? Roughly, as I expect  this would be a constantly moving target due to all the manufacturing/cloning and attrition. 

[sketchley]

1 hour ago, Podtastic said:

Are there any figures for the maximum total numbers of Zentraedi ships, mecha and troopers the Zentraedi had at the height of their power? Roughly, as I expect  this would be a constantly moving target due to all the manufacturing/cloning and attrition. 

Short answer: no.

Long answer: What we can infer is the size of the Bodoru fleet (x number of ships) by his fleet's number (x number of fleets).  What we don't know is a) are all the fleets the same size, b) the attrition rate of ships in an individual fleet, c) the attrition rate of fleets, d) the production rate of ships, and e) the production rate of fleets.

This is further complicated by the vague "height of their power".  Before the Protodevilun wiped out the Protoculture, the Zentradi were used for proxy warfare—implying that portions were being lost while also being newly created.  After the Protodevilun were sealed away, the automated machines kept pumping out the Zentradi war machine.  As the years progressed, and there were less and less of the Supervision Forces for the Zentradi to fight (and suffer devastating losses from), one can presume that the "height of their power" is the current Macross timeline... and that's despite production lines having broken down, and having lost whole categories of weapons!

Edited February 11, 2021 by sketchley

[camk4evr]

6 hours ago, sketchley said:

See, there's a problem with your 'logic'.  Everyone who uses metric on a daily basis (and that's like all of the world except for 3 countries) doesn't use it like that.

It's also confusing because, for example, a megabyte is 1,024 bytes, which is a different scale.  Perhaps you should be writing "1.4 Mm" and "3 Mm"?  Not only is it faster to type, you get to keep your 'grand thing'.

However, 0.0014 Gm and 0.003 Gm roll off the tongue much better—and you can channel Doc Brown, too!

Actually, while a megabyte should be 1024 kilobytes it isn't standardized like the kilobyte (1024 bytes) and is often only 1000 kilobytes (and the same applies to gigabytes as well).

[GabrielV]

Back to the number of crew/troops on a Zentraedi ship, I'm reminded of a video I saw a while back on YouTube which was examining the population density of the Enterprise D in Star Trek: The Next Generation.  The Galaxy class has about 1,000 people on board, but it's also a pretty big ship.  Most of the time, the hallways are sparsely populated or empty in the series.  And at least by that video maker's presentation, this would be expected, because the number of people on board simply isn't any kind of considerable population for a ship that size.

I've never thought much about the population density on a Zentraedi ship.  But what little I recall seeing inside of one in the original TV show, DYRL, and Macross II seems to show mostly empty hallways.  It's not exactly bustling with bodies.  It's kind of similar to those sparse Enterprise D hallways.  Even in DYRL and Macross II, there didn't seem to be much activity going on except in areas where groups of troops with the specific job of apprehending the heroes had gathered.  Sylvie flies down a lot of empty hallways on that Marduuk flagship.

I think the RPG provided some kind of throwaway explanation that Zentraedi line troops were kept in their mecha, and their mecha kept in stasis in large hangars.  We see something similar to this in Macross II where the Zentran pilots are cybernetically linked to their Pods and are kept dormant in their mecha all lined up in hangar areas.  I think the RPG deckplans proposed hangar areas like this for the original ships, just with Pods and stuff packed in like sardines all held in stasis until time for battle. 

[Seto Kaiba]

10 hours ago, twich said:

So, here is a thought....in the teaser that we see, the supposed drone fighter that we see in the black and orange paint scheme with the 4 similar looking pods on it that Chuck and Mirage are seen firing at, if these are indeed thermonuclear reaction engines, why does a drone require 4 of them?  I know that drones are a fraction of the cost of a VF, and I know that they probably use older, cheaper engines in the design, but why have 4 of them?

There are several possible explanations.

As @sketchley noted, one likely explanation is that the four engines are needed to provide a surplus of generator power for something like a high-powered heavy quantum beam cannon ala the YF/VF-27.

Another potential explanation would be a brute force attempt to make up the difference in thrust-to-weight ratio between the previous-gen thermonuclear reaction burst turbine engines and the new, but far more expensive, Stage II thermonuclear reaction turbine engines.  With two 539.37kN-class thermonuclear reaction burst turbine engines, the AIF-7S Ghost has a thrust-to-weight ratio of a hair under 19.3.  Compared to a 4th Gen VF like the VF-171, VF-19, or VF-22, that was substantial.  So much so that it exceeded the VF-19's most high-spec custom variant (Basara's Fire Valkyrie) by a narrow margin and is almost double what the standard NUNS main fighter can do.  The problem with drone wingmen keeping up with 5th Gen VFs is that a 5th Gen VF's average thrust-to-weight ratio hovers around 40... twice what the AIF-7 is capable of.  Since Stage II engines are expensive and the /FC types doubly so, installing them on a drone may be cost-prohibitive.  Using more engines may be a way to brute force the drone's performance up to a level where it can keep up with 5th Generation manned VFs.

 

10 hours ago, twich said:

  We have only seen 4 or more engines on a handful of Kawamori's designs.  The VF-4, the VB-6, the VAB-2/FBz-99, the VF-27 and the YF-29.  Seems rather wasteful of resources to use 4 engines in a drone, unless it isn't a drone, and like the SV-262, the "cockpit" has no external viewports/windscreens.  I guess that we will find out later this year (I Hope), but I am hoping for a few new Variable Fighter designs for Macross Delta.

Smart money says it's a drone.

 

 

8 hours ago, sketchley said:

• VF-27 and YF-29: 2 main thermonuclear engines, 2 sub-thermonuclear engines

One tiny nitpick... the VF-27 has four main engines, all the same FF-3011 type.  Instead of two main engines and two less powerful sub-engines, it has four identical engines at lower power.

 

8 hours ago, sketchley said:

Of those, the VF-4 and VB-6 don't count—the development era or the sheer bulk that has to be moved.  The VF-27 uses those sub-thermonuclear engines to help power its big, honking energy gun.  I can't remember the specifics for the YF-29, but I presume there are similar reasons.

The YF-29's goal was higher mobility than what could be achieved through aerodynamics alone, at least according to Macross Chronicle.

 

8 hours ago, sketchley said:

The FBz-99 is the odd one out simply because it has 4 engines of equal performance.  Are they used for powering its extensive beam weapons (like the VF-27)?  When I get around to translating the Macross Chronicle sheet for it I'll have that answer.

The sheet does mention that it's presumed that it can fire multiple high-output laser weapons simultaneously because of "an unknown technology of the Protodeviln".  That's under the "Fighter mode" section on the FBz-99G sheet.

 

 

8 hours ago, sketchley said:

It's also confusing because, for example, a megabyte is 1,024 bytes, which is a different scale.  Perhaps you should be writing "1.4 Mm" and "3 Mm"?  Not only is it faster to type, you get to keep your 'grand thing'.

Well... yes and no?  The actual correct term for that isn't commonly used except by programmers working on assembly language or other low-level functions like embedded control architectures.  When powers of 10 are being used for consumer convenience, they use SI prefixes, but there are actually special terms for the binary equivalents that go by 1,024s... the kibibyte, mebibyte, gibibyte, and so on.  If you see the unit written with a lowercase "i" in the middle (e.g. KiB, MiB, GiB) it's the binary equivalent.  Almost nobody remembers these are separate units and will often read KiB as kilobyte.

 

 

7 hours ago, Podtastic said:

Are there any figures for the maximum total numbers of Zentraedi ships, mecha and troopers the Zentraedi had at the height of their power? Roughly, as I expect  this would be a constantly moving target due to all the manufacturing/cloning and attrition. 

According to Macross Chronicle, there were at one point around 5,000 fleet motherships were mass-produced.

It's unclear if all main fleets were originally the same size... which makes such a determination difficult.

 

 

24 minutes ago, GabrielV said:

Back to the number of crew/troops on a Zentraedi ship, I'm reminded of a video I saw a while back on YouTube which was examining the population density of the Enterprise D in Star Trek: The Next Generation.  The Galaxy class has about 1,000 people on board, but it's also a pretty big ship.  Most of the time, the hallways are sparsely populated or empty in the series.  And at least by that video maker's presentation, this would be expected, because the number of people on board simply isn't any kind of considerable population for a ship that size.

In that specific case, it's also worth noting that the areas of the ship where corridors are usually seen are in the ship's crew/residential areas inside the saucer section and primarily mid-shift when foot traffic through those areas would be at its absolute lowest.

 

24 minutes ago, GabrielV said:

I've never thought much about the population density on a Zentraedi ship.  But what little I recall seeing inside of one in the original TV show, DYRL, and Macross II seems to show mostly empty hallways.  It's not exactly bustling with bodies.  It's kind of similar to those sparse Enterprise D hallways.  Even in DYRL and Macross II, there didn't seem to be much activity going on except in areas where groups of troops with the specific job of apprehending the heroes had gathered.  Sylvie flies down a lot of empty hallways on that Marduuk flagship.

The one we see the most of - Vrlitwhai's ship - is, in scale to its crew about twice the size of a Galaxy-class Federation Starship from Star Trek.  If you work backwards from the total population of the Boddole Zer fleet the average ship crew is somewhere on the order of 1,500, which would explain why the corridors aren't packed.

 

24 minutes ago, GabrielV said:

I think the RPG provided some kind of throwaway explanation that Zentraedi line troops were kept in their mecha, and their mecha kept in stasis in large hangars.  We see something similar to this in Macross II where the Zentran pilots are cybernetically linked to their Pods and are kept dormant in their mecha all lined up in hangar areas.  I think the RPG deckplans proposed hangar areas like this for the original ships, just with Pods and stuff packed in like sardines all held in stasis until time for battle. 

The RPG's line was that everyone except the ship's command crew and deck protection were stored in cold sleep between battles... which was very much at odds with the animation that clearly showed the crew living in bunkrooms when off duty, and said bunkrooms being where most of the swapping of human cultural paraphernalia occurred in the TV series.

In Macross II, the Mardook's Zentradi were kept in brainwashing booths most of the time.

 

[Podtastic]

14 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

It's unclear if all main fleets were originally the same size... which makes such a determination difficult.

Is there any reason not to expect at least theoretical standardisation in terms of fleet strength and composition? 

15 hours ago, GabrielV said:

I think the RPG provided some kind of throwaway explanation that Zentraedi line troops were kept in their mecha, and their mecha kept in stasis in large hangars.  We see something similar to this in Macross II where the Zentran pilots are cybernetically linked to their Pods and are kept dormant in their mecha all lined up in hangar areas.  I think the RPG deckplans proposed hangar areas like this for the original ships, just with Pods and stuff packed in like sardines all held in stasis until time for battle. 

This is kind of the same idea I had for the Zentraedi ship complement back in the 80's, albeit also with large numbers of infantry stored.  When I proposed this to a friend he responded:

"You mean...packed in like sardines? You're inhuman."

15 hours ago, GabrielV said:

I've never thought much about the population density on a Zentraedi ship.  But what little I recall seeing inside of one in the original TV show, DYRL, and Macross II seems to show mostly empty hallways.  It's not exactly bustling with bodies.

Hence I thought the mecha and troop complement could be increased somewhat.

Edited February 12, 2021 by Podtastic

[Seto Kaiba]

3 hours ago, Podtastic said:

Is there any reason not to expect at least theoretical standardisation in terms of fleet strength and composition? 

It's difficult to say... because our only view into the size and composition of Zentradi forces is their operating conditions after ~500,000 years of sustained attrition warfare and after at least some of the equipment the Protoculture originally created for them was lost with the destruction of the factory satellites producing it.

In short, we've never seen a Zentradi fleet in what you might call "mint condition".  

We can't say that the Boddole Zer fleet was a typical size, larger, or smaller than the average because we don't have an average.  Macross II's timeline kind of leaned towards Boddole Zer's fleet being a nice middle-of-the-road sized formation.

When it comes to Macross II's timeline - Macross 2036 and Macross: Eternal Love Song in particular - it's still difficult to say if individual Zentradi main fleets are equipped differently or not every fleet has lost the same designs over the intervening millennia.  For instance, we know that the factory satellites producing the Glaug were destroyed and the Glaugs that the Boddole Zer fleet uses were units recovered from storage at a weapons depot some time after the factory satellite was lost.  We don't know if battle pods and suits like the Gruza Frii, Exa Glaug, Rogren Ro, Shigunomiyu, and Shrukeru Gao were designs that the Boddole Zer fleet never had, or had lost access to over time.  The Burado and Neld fleets still had them.

 

 

Quote

This is kind of the same idea I had for the Zentraedi ship complement back in the 80's, albeit also with large numbers of infantry stored.  When I proposed this to a friend he responded:

"You mean...packed in like sardines? You're inhuman."

Hence I thought the mecha and troop complement could be increased somewhat.

As ethically dubious as creating a clone army is just on its own, even the ancient Protoculture tried to at least give the clone soldiers they'd created some kind of quality of life.  Rank and file Zentradi might've been considered borderline disposable but they still got to sleep in actual beds (in bunkrooms that would be considered surprisingly spacious compared to modern human warships), their food actually resembled real food, and they even had alcoholic beverage rations.  Higher-ranking Zentradi apparently even had private quarters, like Vrlitwhai.

The Mardook treated their Zentradi a lot more harshly, using mind control to strictly regulate them to the point of considering them little more than biological robots they had zero qualms about ordering into suicide attacks.

Edited February 12, 2021 by Seto Kaiba

[Podtastic]

On 2/12/2021 at 1:19 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

We can't say that the Boddole Zer fleet was a typical size, larger, or smaller than the average because we don't have an average

Wiki is wrong then ? How disappointing. Five thousand fleets at = or > five million ships apiece is impressive. And nice to pull out in versus debates.

On 2/12/2021 at 1:19 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

When it comes to Macross II's timeline - Macross 2036 and Macross: Eternal Love Song in particular - it's still difficult to say if individual Zentradi main fleets are equipped differently or not every fleet has lost the same designs over the intervening millennia. 

It would be nice if some kind of table of organisation existed. 

Its frustrating that so much interesting technical and other information for the Zentraedi just isn't there. There are no detailed warship cross-sections like we have for Star Wars and Star Trek, there is no comprehensive explanation for exactly how the  main gun is powered, no imagery for what the gunnery stations look like, no information on how far a warship can theoretically fold e.t.c.

Edited February 15, 2021 by Podtastic

[Seto Kaiba]

4 hours ago, Podtastic said:

Wiki is wrong then ? How disappointing.

Which wiki do you mean?  The Macross Compendium wiki - AKA "the reliable one" - has never said anything about the size of other Main Fleets.

The one freehosted at fandom.net is entirely useless because its lax or nonexistent content moderation has left it a dumpster fire of unsourced statements, misinformation, fanon, and fan-fiction.  It's so poorly-researched and poorly-edited it wouldn't be headed the wrong way rebranding itself as a wiki for the R-word series.

 

4 hours ago, Podtastic said:

Five thousand fleets at = or > five million ships apiece is impressive. And nice to pull out in versus debates.

Versus debates are usually pretty pointless without an objective framework for comparison.

Mind you, the problem here is simply that we don't know how big Zentradi main fleets originally were.  According to Macross Chronicle, contemporary main fleets number between several hundred thousand and several million warships.

 

4 hours ago, Podtastic said:

It would be nice if some kind of table of organisation existed. 

Odds are it would have been impossible to produce such a document covering all existing Zentradi forces even when the Protoculture were still around, given how decentralized the production of Zentradi troops, ships, and other war materiel was (by design).  Never mind any potential innovations, improvements, and new design rollouts that may have occurred on one side or the other during the Stellar Republic's civil war and the early phases of the war against the Supervision Army.  (Like the enemy battle suit from Macross Plus, which is hypothesized to have been developed under such circumstances.)

 

4 hours ago, Podtastic said:

Its frustrating that so much interesting technical and other information for the Zentraedi just isn't there. There are no detailed warship cross-sections like we have for Star Wars and Star Trek, there is no comprehensive explanation for exactly how the  main gun is powered, no imagery for what the gunnery stations look like, no information on how far a warship can theoretically fold e.t.c.

It's quite rare for Japanese media to go into such an exhaustive level of detail.

Even for western media like Star Trek or Star Wars, publications with that level of detail are generally non-canon or pseudo-canon at best.

Mind you, the mass production of war materiel for the Zentradi forces is heavily decentralized and the individual fully-automated factory satellites have been independently making refinements to the designs they produce for the last 500,000 years.  So two ships of the same class made at the same time by two different factory satellites may not have the same exact specs or internal layout, or even two ships of the same class made at the same factory satellite a few millennia apart.

How a ship's main gun is powered is no mystery.  It's connected to the ship's power grid, which is energized by the ship's clusters of thermonuclear reactors.

Likewise, the gunnery stations aren't exactly a mystery.  They're one of the workstation "blisters" on a ship's bridge.

How far ships can fold is something as dependent on local conditions as it is on the amount of energy a ship can store and the performance of the ship's fold system.

[Podtastic]

13 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Which wiki do you mean?

The one that says the Zentraedi had 2000 fleets of about 4.8 million ships. 

13 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Versus debates are usually pretty pointless without an objective framework for comparison.

Pitting the most interesting factions from different genres against each other is fun though. Who hasn't wondered how a Zentraedi-Galactic Empire war would go? They're fun to read - until they degenerate into nitpicky arguments about what is and isn't canon. 

13 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Odds are it would have been impossible to produce such a document covering all existing Zentradi forces even when the Protoculture were still around,

In universe. I'm just wishing for Bandai, or Studio Nui or whoever to fake it.

The Macross  Zentraedi versions of the Star Wars Sourcebook, Imperial Sourcebook, Technical Companions, Blueprints, Incredible Cross Sections, Guide to vehicles and vessels/Weapons and technology etc.

13 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

It's quite rare for Japanese media to go into such an exhaustive level of detail.

Unless its Valkyries or idols in Macross. Yes I know.

13 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

generally non-canon or pseudo-canon at best.

Canon yesterday, not-canon-today-we-have-a-new-direction-from-marketing, things-we-only-just-thought-of-will-be-retconned-as-canon-tomorrow.

Canon-shmanon.

Just as long as it were to be packed with interesting explanations and awesome cross-sections.

13 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

How a ship's main gun is powered is no mystery.  It's connected to the ship's power grid, which is energized by the ship's clusters of thermonuclear reactors.

High level, and missing the complete process. Where do the fold drives come in, how does the weapon itself work e.tc.

I'm talking about a step-by-step detailed explanation of the whole process from powering up to firing, with diagrams and cross-sections. Something inspiring you can pull out and read at 02h00 am and be rejuvenated with energy.

13 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Likewise, the gunnery stations aren't exactly a mystery.  They're one of the workstation "blisters" on a ship's bridge.

Is that confirmed? Those aren't just coms stations communicating with the actual gunners?

13 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

How far ships can fold is something as dependent on local conditions as it is on the amount of energy a ship can store and the performance of the ship's fold system.

Rather vague.

What is the maximum range a standard fully powered Thuverl Salan can fold in one "jump", fold faults notwithstanding?

  A few kiloparsecs? A few megaparsecs?  A few gigaparsecs? Unlimited?

 

Edited February 16, 2021 by Podtastic

[Seto Kaiba]

18 minutes ago, Podtastic said:

The one that says the Zentraedi had 2000 fleets of about 4.8 million ships. 

Which is...?

 

18 minutes ago, Podtastic said:

Pitting the most interesting factions from different genres against each other is fun though. Who hasn't wondered how a Zentraedi-Galactic Empire war would go? They're fun to read - until they degenerate into nitpicky arguments about what is and isn't canon. 

Eh... having been dragged into, or quoted at considerable length in, entirely too many of those kind of "debates" I feel fairly safe in saying they're mostly bullsh*tting competitions where two sides talk past each other until one or both sides get frustrated and give up.

Very rarely do two franchises have enough comparable types of detail for an objective comparison to be made.  On the incredibly rare occasion that kind of debate happens, it isn't long-lived because inevitably one side outclasses the other by such a gargantuan margin that the entire premise is rendered comical like comparing Gundam's Universal Century to its close cousins Macross or Five Star Stories.  

Spoiler

Seriously... how long-lived is a debate about capability going to be when a megawatt is a massive amount of power on one side and such a piddlingly small amount of power on the other that it's a rounding error on the other?  Gundam fans seldom take it well when it's pointed out that based on objective performance specs the original Gundam's game-changingly powerful 1.9 megawatt beam rifle was less than half as powerful as the VF-1A-4 lightest weapon: its 5 megawatt coaxial laser cannon.  It usually does down in flames pretty quick from there... sometimes literally.

 

18 minutes ago, Podtastic said:

In universe. I'm just wishing for Bandai, or Studio Nui or whoever to fake it.

You're probably going to be waiting a long time.

 

18 minutes ago, Podtastic said:

The Macross  Zentraedi versions of the Star Wars Sourcebook, Imperial Sourcebook, Technical Companions, Blueprints, Incredible Cross Sections, Guide to vehicles and vessels/Weapons and technology etc.

Didn't Star Wars throw most, if not all, of that sh*t out years ago?

 

18 minutes ago, Podtastic said:

Unless its Valkyries or idols in Macross. Yes I know.

When it comes to Valkyries, the technical manuals are pretty much explicitly non-canon until or unless their content is referenced in official setting material.

Even so, they're somewhat more forgiving since a lot of the technology they discuss in detail in those books is quite real and the coverage of the fictional technology tends to be in much vaguer terms.

 

18 minutes ago, Podtastic said:

Canon yesterday, not-canon-today-we-have-a-new-direction-from-marketing, things-we-only-just-thought-of-will-be-retconned-as-canon-tomorrow.

Canon-shmanon.

Just as long as it were to be packed with interesting explanations and awesome cross-sections.

Like as not, canon/continuity tends to be pretty important in material being marketed to fans.

Casuals aren't going to care and thus aren't going to buy that stuff.  It's the die-hards who are going to buy that sort of thing and examine it in detail and they tend to get rather twitchy when things change unexpectedly if they're not used to an airy-fairy "I do what a f*cking want" sort like Kawamori.  Witness the brouhaha that ensued in Star Wars when Disney quietly broomed the moldering landfill that was the Star Wars expanded universe.

 

18 minutes ago, Podtastic said:

High level, and missing the complete process.

High level is about all you're going to get from a completely fictional technology 99.999999% of the time.

Normally if you're fool enough to ask the showrunners of a sci-fi series how their fictional tech works, they'll give you a smartarse answer like "it works very well, thank you".  

But, to summarize for your benefit:

 

18 minutes ago, Podtastic said:

Where do the fold drives come in, how does the weapon itself work e.tc.

The ship's fold system isn't part of a super dimension energy cannon... the reason the disappearance of the Macross's fold system screwed the ship's main gun was because it took a substantial amount of the high-capacity power transfer conduits that linked those high-demand systems to the ship's power grid with it when it went.  The Macross wasn't carrying a sufficient quantity of replacement conduit to bridge the newly opened gap in its power grid, so the modular transformation was devised to rearrange the ship and its power grid for the sake of reconnecting the main gun.

As to how the weapon works... energized fold carbon is used as a catalyst to produce a particular type of exotic matter called heavy quantum possesses vast mass that exists mostly in higher dimensional "fold space" but also protrudes into our three-dimensional space.  The heavy quanta are collected in the barrel of the gun and confined using a focused warp in spacetime similar to a pinpoint barrier.  The gathered heavy quantum is then excited by fold wave resonance, which causes the heavy quantum's mass to drop into realspace and its own hyperintense gravity causes it to collapse on itself and auto-ignite in a thermonuclear fusion detonation.  As with any cannon, it's essentially a pipe with one open end that's intended to allow all that energy only one direction in which to escape (read: "This End Towards Enemy").  So that confined fusion detonation of the gathered heavy quantum winds up as a high-velocity fusion plasma beam that's decidedly unhealthy to be in the path of.

It's not dissimilar in principle to the mega-particle weapons of Gundam's Universal Century... or the nuclear bazooka from Gundam 0038: Stardust Memory.

 

18 minutes ago, Podtastic said:

Is that confirmed? Those aren't just coms stations communicating with the actual gunners?

Have you looked at the turrets?  There's nowhere for a gunner to sit in there.

 

18 minutes ago, Podtastic said:

Rather vague.

Yes... the in-universe population found that rather unhelpful as well.

The logistical problems of running an interstellar civilization using space fold technology were a direct cause of both the Protoculture's civil war and the New UN Government's own Second Unification War.  It's very hard to govern a colony that's years away for even your fastest ships even in ideal conditions and could be temporarily cut off by anomalies ("fold faults") in higher-dimensional space that could disrupt travel, communication, or both, or force messages and ships to painstakingly circumnavigate the disruption at the cost of far more time.  

That was one reason among many that fold quartz was such a valuable, highly sought-after commodity.  Fold systems made with fold quartz instead of fold carbon were powerful enough to be mostly or entirely unaffected by those disruptions in higher-dimensional spacetime.  Unfortunately, the same properties that make it even better at helping to make incredibly powerful local gravitational effects had more applications than just buffering inertial g-forces or tying space-time in knots to teleport.  They could also be used to make weapons of frankly apocalyptic power, which is why the already rare material that could only be obtained from Vajra carcasses and Protoculture ruins was heavily regulated by the New UN Government... to prevent the proliferation of planet-killing WMDs.

 

18 minutes ago, Podtastic said:

What is the maximum range a standard fully powered Thuverl Salan can fold in one "jump", fold faults notwithstanding?

  A few kiloparsecs? A few megaparsecs?  A few gigaparsecs? Unlimited?

The longest single fold jump explicitly mentioned in-series is approximately 1,000 light years.

Most fold jumps are explicitly of much shorter range, usually a few dozen to at most a few hundred light years like the 11.7 light year trip from Eden to Earth in Macross Plus, the 12 light year fold jump the Macross Quarter made to the location of the Macross Galaxy fleet refugees, or the 30 light year trip that Hayate and Freyja took from Al Shahal to Ragna for her audition.  A long-distance fold jump seems to be somewhere around 800 light years... the distance of the Macross Frontier's emergency fold to escape the Vajra and the distance separating Ragna from Windermere IV.

[Podtastic]

23 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Which is...?

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Zentradi.

23 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Two sides talk past each other until one or both sides get frustrated and give up.

True. But interesting tidbits of lore etc are often dropped along the way.

23 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

You're probably going to be waiting a long time.

Like forevernever.

23 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Didn't Star Wars throw most, if not all, of that sh*t out years ago?

I don't care what they did. 

23 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Wtness the brouhaha that ensued in Star Wars when Disney quietly broomed the moldering landfill that was the Star Wars expanded universe.

Some fans take things too seriously, some even making death threats I hear. I on the other hand will just "I do what a f**ckng want."

Even so, Thrawn seems to have made it, and he was the real prize from the EU anyway.

23 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

But, to summarize for your benefit:

Thank you kindly.

23 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

he ship's fold system isn't part of a super dimension energy cannon... the reason the disappearance of the Macross's fold system screwed the ship's main gun was because it took a substantial amount of the high-capacity power transfer conduits that linked those high-demand systems to the ship's power grid with it when it went.  The Macross wasn't carrying a sufficient quantity of replacement conduit to bridge the newly opened gap in its power grid, so the modular transformation was devised to rearrange the ship and its power grid for the sake of reconnecting the main gun.

As to how the weapon works... energized fold carbon is used as a catalyst to produce a particular type of exotic matter called heavy quantum possesses vast mass that exists mostly in higher dimensional "fold space" but also protrudes into our three-dimensional space.  The heavy quanta are collected in the barrel of the gun and confined using a focused warp in spacetime similar to a pinpoint barrier.  The gathered heavy quantum is then excited by fold wave resonance, which causes the heavy quantum's mass to drop into realspace and its own hyperintense gravity causes it to collapse on itself and auto-ignite in a thermonuclear fusion detonation.  As with any cannon, it's essentially a pipe with one open end that's intended to allow all that energy only one direction in which to escape (read: "This End Towards Enemy").  So that confined fusion detonation of the gathered heavy quantum winds up as a high-velocity fusion plasma beam that's decidedly unhealthy to be in the path of.

It's not dissimilar in principle to the mega-particle weapons of Gundam's Universal Century... or the nuclear bazooka from Gundam 0038: Stardust Memory.

Now we're talking.

23 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Have you looked at the turrets?  There's nowhere for a gunner to sit in there.

Never envisioned that, just gunnery stations elsewhere in the ship closer to the guns.

23 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Unfortunately, the same properties that make it even better at helping to make incredibly powerful local gravitational effects had more applications than just buffering inertial g-forces or tying space-time in knots to teleport.  They could also be used to make weapons of frankly apocalyptic power

Unfortunately? That's awesome! Zentraedi warships need this now!!

23 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

he longest single fold jump explicitly mentioned in-series is approximately 1,000 light years.

Most fold jumps are explicitly of much shorter range, usually a few dozen to at most a few hundred light years like the 11.7 light year trip from Eden to Earth in Macross Plus, the 12 light year fold jump the Macross Quarter made to the location of the Macross Galaxy fleet refugees, or the 30 light year trip that Hayate and Freyja took from Al Shahal to Ragna for her audition.  A long-distance fold jump seems to be somewhere around 800 light years...

So you could cross the long axis of the Laowon Imperium (Starhammer)  in around 7 jumps, but are no competition for  a Spacing Guild Heighliner (Dune).

Its seems similar to how a Laowon Battlejumper does it.

[Seto Kaiba]

7 hours ago, Podtastic said:

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Zentradi

Never heard of it... but looking at the article, that the article makes frequent reference to Robotech and uses art from the Robotech role-playing game should've been a massive clue that it wasn't reliable.

 

7 hours ago, Podtastic said:

Never envisioned that, just gunnery stations elsewhere in the ship closer to the guns.

Not sure why they would be.  Normally gunnery control on a modern warship is on the bridge unless the turret is being operated manually.

 

7 hours ago, Podtastic said:

Unfortunately? That's awesome! Zentraedi warships need this now!!

Mercifully, it's a technology that the ancient Protoculture either didn't give them or couldn't give them.

The destructive potential of thermonuclear reaction weaponry already far exceeds what conventional nuclear and thermonuclear weapons are capable of, since the technology isn't limited by the capabilities of a fission trigger due to the use of heavy quantum as an implosion trigger.  Like dimensional beam weaponry, it's a weapon with the potential to totally depopulate a planet with a carpet bombing but it's not the kind of thing that could outright destroy a planet.  Dimensional warheads are much, MUCH more destructive and even a dimensional warhead the size of a minivan can effectively destroy a planet like LAI's first effort did to Gallia IV.

It's possible, with time and a lot of effort, to render a planet glassed by the Zentradi's heavy quantum reaction cannons to livable conditions.  There's no fixing a planet that's been destroyed by the superintense gravity of a fold bomb.

 

7 hours ago, Podtastic said:

So you could cross the long axis of the Laowon Imperium (Starhammer)  in around 7 jumps, but are no competition for  a Spacing Guild Heighliner (Dune).

Its seems similar to how a Laowon Battlejumper does it.

Macross's space fold tech works kind of similarly to Dune's... in that they're tying higher-dimensional space in knots to cause two volumes of realspace to violently swap places.

[NightmarePlus]

So how exactly do Thermonuclear Reaction weapons work in depth? 

[Master Dex]

39 minutes ago, NightmarePlus said:

So how exactly do Thermonuclear Reaction weapons work in depth? 

As usual Seto will give the details cause he has them all so neatly available. I will say it's not unlike his explanation earlier of the beam cannons but in bomb form basically.

There is also a second type of reaction weapon called a pair-annihilation weapon (I think introduced in M7 and is the reaction weapon in Frontier and later until dimensional weapons become the real doomsday devices) that are basically OTech antimatter warheads. There is something I think that is particular about them beyond just having antimatter on board though but I can't recall what.. in fact I kinda am interested in seeing what Seto has on that too.