Super Macross Mecha Fun Time Discussion Thread!

[Valkyrie Driver]

6 minutes ago, Sir Galahad® said:

The Macross Mecha Manual is a wealth of information, it doesn't have any info on Delta though.

http://www.macross2.net/m3/macrossf/yf-29.htm

I'm familiar with Macross Mecha Manual. Seto and Mr March are the owners of the site. 

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, Valkyrie Driver said:

As for the YF-29, Looking at the toy, I see 6 Micro missile launchers (2 shoulder mounted, and 2 outboard on each leg/engine nacelle), the back mounted twin beam cannons, the head lasers, and the Beam Gun Pod (which I don't know the technical name for).

Each port is a separate missile launcher... there are four ports on each leg, and two on each outboard engine pod, twelve launchers in total.  The shoulder-mounted missiles seem to be a feature unique to the toy.

("Beam gun pod" pretty much is the technical name for it... or "heavy quantum beam gun pod" if you want to be specific abou the technology used.)

 

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There are ports on the hips, and forearms which look like they should be weapons, and then there are supposed to be guns of some kind in the monitor turret. 

The ones on the forearms are confirmed to be verniers, of a type identical to those used on the VF-25 Super Pack.

The hip gunmounts carried over from the VF-25 and VF-27 are inexplicably not mentioned, even though a gun barrel is visible on the CG model.  

The YF-29 is unique among VFs in that its monitor turret-mounted guns are solid ammo weapons firing MDE rounds rather than beam weapons.

 

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Is it true that the YF-29 was supposed to have the same performance and firepower of the VF-25 with tornado parts?

Not really... the Tornado Pack was a method of field testing some of the design choices that went into the YF-29, including the beam turret and the flight dynamics with the rotating engine pods, but the final version that went into the YF-29 was much more powerful and deadly, given its more powerful engines and the turret being a MDE beam cannon on the YF-29.

 

1 hour ago, Sir Galahad® said:

The Macross Mecha Manual is a wealth of information, it doesn't have any info on Delta though.

http://www.macross2.net/m3/macrossf/yf-29.htm

Working on that, but we do have day jobs y'know...

I am way the hell behind on my translations.  

 

1 hour ago, SMS007 said:

The manual's information is largely copied from various Macross books.

Well, yeah... same as every other Macross site worth a damn, including the Macross Compendium, Macross Wiki, Sketchley's Macross Gateway, etc.  That's how research works when you're compiling a reference site from official materials.

The same is also generally true for Macross Chronicle, the franchise's official encyclopedia, which I can attest is primarily just an effective condensation of material from previous Macross publications... albeit periodically garnished with new information and clarifications.  They did miss some truly obscure stuff I have in my collection, but you can't win 'em all.

 

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Do be aware, though, that the Manual's translations and romanizations are not of professional quality. 

... you do realize that's me you're taking shots at, right?

I've only done a few translations on a professional basis (for the SAE), but outside of the guys who worked on Macross Delta's BD official subs all of the Macross translators here are fans and volunteers doing it for the love of the game.  We may not be pros, but we get the job done.

The romanizations used are, wherever possible, the official romanizations provided in English in various official publications.  There are a few that need to be updated based on new documents, but like any living document the site exists in a process of continuous revision.

Edited November 9, 2017 by Seto Kaiba

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, Valkyrie Driver said:

I'm familiar with Macross Mecha Manual. Seto and Mr March are the owners of the site. 

It's Mr March's project, I just translate and hunt sources and keep the server ticking over.

Edited November 9, 2017 by Seto Kaiba

[Sir Galahad®]

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Working on that, but we do have day jobs y'know...

I am way the hell behind on my translations.  

I'm not complaining about that though. You guys do a hell of the job. I always assumed that there were no info because Macross Delta had little info out at the moment.

 

[SMS007]

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Well, yeah... same as every other Macross site worth a damn, including the Macross Compendium, Macross Wiki, Sketchley's Macross Gateway, etc.  That's how research works when you're compiling a reference site from official materials.

The same is also generally true for Macross Chronicle, the franchise's official encyclopedia, which I can attest is primarily just an effective condensation of material from previous Macross publications... albeit periodically garnished with new information and clarifications.  They did miss some truly obscure stuff I have in my collection, but you can't win 'em all.

That wasn't a shot against the Manual; I was pointing out the Manual gets data straight from the source and it's not run by randos making up stuff from nowhere.

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

... you do realize that's me you're taking shots at, right?

I've only done a few translations on a professional basis (for the SAE), but outside of the guys who worked on Macross Delta's BD official subs all of the Macross translators here are fans and volunteers doing it for the love of the game.  We may not be pros, but we get the job done.

The romanizations used are, wherever possible, the official romanizations provided in English in various official publications.  There are a few that need to be updated based on new documents, but like any living document the site exists in a process of continuous revision.

That was indeed a gross oversimplification on my part. I apologize.

And no, I wasn't aware the Manual had more than one primary contributor. I assumed from the lack of updates since the Frontier movies that it was just the one guy who ran the Facebook page and he was busy with some day job.

Edited November 9, 2017 by SMS007

[ManhattanProject972]

I wonder how far those missiles that chased Isamu out of Eden's atmo before he folded to earth traveled?

They looked pretty small so I don't know if they were surfaced launched or not. 

[Seto Kaiba]

8 hours ago, Sir Galahad® said:

I'm not complaining about that though. You guys do a hell of the job. I always assumed that there were no info because Macross Delta had little info out at the moment.

He does a hell of a job.  I just vomit up torrents of factoids and continuity data on command, which he reorganizes and polishes into those beautifully succinct summaries while decorating them with a bunch of beautifully cleaned-up and colorized art pieces.  

 

8 hours ago, SMS007 said:

And no, I wasn't aware the Manual had more than one primary contributor. I assumed from the lack of updates since the Frontier movies that it was just the one guy who ran the Facebook page and he was busy with some day job.

It's had a few helpers like me in the past, like the bloke who used to run the UN Spacy Quartermasters Database site (wasn't that briscojr84?).  I don't have anything to do with the FB page, that's all Mr March.  Better that way, IMO, otherwise it'd be less "hey look at the cool art" and more like my replies in this thread.  Brevity is the soul of wit, I suppose.

But yeah, day jobs suck that way.  Mr March kind of comes at it in surges of activity, then burns out on Macross for a bit and pursues other interests before coming back to it.  I sort of maintain a low-level plod of activity on translations and so on because it's good practice and because it's very effective as diversions from my work go.  I do occasionally find myself diverted into other shows if someone presents me with an interesting question, like the guys on the MAHQ forums asking after development history data from an old Zeta Gundam side story Tyrant Sword of Neofalia.

I'm really, REALLY behind on translations at this point though.  Four whole articles went to print on the site without data because I haven't finished them yet, and the pile of magazine articles, books, liner notes, etc. waiting to have their contents appraised and translated is now well over a meter in height... over two if you count the Gundam and Ghost in the Shell books I bought in the dealer hall at Super Dimension Convention last month.  I'm still barely twenty pages into the Macross Journal Extra: VF-1 Valkyrie Special Edition "Sky Angels" book if you don't count the jumping around for a variety of interesting tidbits.  

 

7 hours ago, ManhattanProject972 said:

I wonder how far those missiles that chased Isamu out of Eden's atmo before he folded to earth traveled?

They looked pretty small so I don't know if they were surfaced launched or not. 

Yeah, they just seem to come outta nowhere, don't they?  From the display in the scene right after they fold away, it looks like they were launched from low orbit... maybe a defense station like the ones we see over Earth (and which Isamu shoots down to use as cover for his reentry)?

[Valkyrie Driver]

11 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

It's Mr March's project, I just translate and hunt sources and keep the server ticking over.

You know, now that you mention it, I knew that. But I also know how much intellectual sweat equity you have in the project so... credit where credit is due I suppose?

 

[sketchley]

8 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

I'm really, REALLY behind on translations at this point though.  Four whole articles went to print on the site without data because I haven't finished them yet, and the pile of magazine articles, books, liner notes, etc. waiting to have their contents appraised and translated is now well over a meter in height... (...)
 

Heh... tell me about it.  (^_^;)

I'm in the same boat.  I'm currently bogged down in transferring the remaining content from the MRG (before it disappears into the either), despite my strong interest in pumping out translations of stuff that hasn't been translated yet.

On the one hand, it's nice to go back and revise the translations, but on the other hand, as I'm striving for perfection, it takes a lot more time than I have available... >.<;;;

[Sir Galahad®]

I wonder what kind of hardware would a VF-24 that only has two engines have the same or even better performance than the YF-29 that has four?

[Sildani]

Because THOSE two engines go to eleven!

 

So, Sketchely and Seto: where’d your Nihongo education come from?

[Master Dex]

1 minute ago, Sir Galahad® said:

I wonder what kind of hardware would a VF-24 that only has two engines have the same or even better performance than the YF-29 that has four?

May be asking the wrong question there. More like why did the YF-29 require 4 engines and a huge chunk of fold quartz, the fold wave system, and a ton of MDE based weaponry before it could compare to a Federal spec fighter based on the parent design of all 5th gen fighters? Clearly Federal NUNS has access to reactor and engine tech WAY ahead of the stuff they allow the "colonials" to use.

[Seto Kaiba]

10 hours ago, Valkyrie Driver said:

You know, now that you mention it, I knew that. But I also know how much intellectual sweat equity you have in the project so... credit where credit is due I suppose?

Meh, anyone could do what I do with a little patience and a fair amount of practice.  I always find myself a little bit in awe of the artistic skill that goes into cleaning up scans and colorizing the lineart for the site.  My only artistic skills are in music, so seeing him turn scans of grainy transfers or poorly copied line art in artbooks and turning them into all the glorious color art is a bit like watching a magic show for me.  

(He's threatened to try teaching me on a few occasions, and I've told him if he did I'd feel so bad for wasting his time I'd have to buy him a Creative Cloud membership.)

 

 

2 hours ago, sketchley said:

Heh... tell me about it.  (^_^;)

I'm in the same boat.  I'm currently bogged down in transferring the remaining content from the MRG (before it disappears into the either), despite my strong interest in pumping out translations of stuff that hasn't been translated yet.

On the one hand, it's nice to go back and revise the translations, but on the other hand, as I'm striving for perfection, it takes a lot more time than I have available... >.<;;;

Super Dimension Con was definitely the straw that broke the camel's back this year... after finally unpacking the last of my purchases and shelving them, I'm out of shelf space in my study again and perilously close to running out of space on the DVD rack after buying another copy of Macross Plus (the American OVA release this time) that Les Claypool III was right there to autograph for me.  Sturdier bookshelves might not be goin' the wrong way either... do your bookshelves bend in the middle under the weight of Chronicle?  I've been using shelves from Sauder Woodcrafts, and I swear they're one fly's cough from snapping in half under the weight.

I'm right there with you on that fight between wanting to cover new titles and wanting to go back and improve old stuff.  I've got a bunch of books I only did bits and pieces of I'd love to go back and finish, but I cringe every time Mr March or someone else asks me to check any of my notes from Chronicle 1st Ed. because they're a handwritten mess of non-sequiturs and crossed-out sentence fragments that looks like it was written by someone chasing an ink-soaked chicken across a legal pad.

 

 

1 hour ago, Sir Galahad® said:

I wonder what kind of hardware would a VF-24 that only has two engines have the same or even better performance than the YF-29 that has four?

Hm.

If you work backward from the thrust-to-weight ratio and assume that the VF-24's ratio and overall acceleration is similar to the YF-29's but has a mass similar to the fighters directly derived from it (e.g. VF-25, YF-30, VF-31) it's looking like about 2,535kN per engine... about 20% more output than the YF-29's main engines.  Just in case you want to check my math:

Spoiler

VF-24 (Speculative): (2535kN*2) / (8450kg * 9.807m/s^2) = 61.1807892
YF-29[A] Durandal: (2105kN*2 + 1470kN*2) / (11920kg * 9.807m/s^2) = 61.1636805

 

 

1 hour ago, Sildani said:

Because THOSE two engines go to eleven!

Twelve.  They go up to twelve.  The YF-29 needed four Stage II engines and a fold wave system to do that...

 

 

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So, Sketchely and Seto: where’d your Nihongo education come from?

Because I was a smartarse in school and didn't take a practical language (classical Latin, woo!), my education in Japanese started informally while I was still at the university.  At the time, I was dating a gal from Nagano who started teaching me the rudiments of written and spoken Japanese as a twofold effort to get me familiar enough with the language that she could share some of her favorite books with me while I helped her build proficiency in English, and to prepare me to eventually meet her parents.

The first part went pretty well, all told... within about two years I was able to at least muddle through light novels with frequent recourse to a pocket dictionary.  The second part was an unqualified disaster, as her parents disapproved to say the least (and were rather rude about it until they realized I could understand what they were saying).  The whole relationship kind of self-destructed a while after that, but I kept going with learning the language because it fit together neatly with my other hobbies.  The many inconsistencies and errors in the Palladium Books Macross II RPG had bugged me for some time, and since I had the skillset to start unpicking the puzzle I figured "why not?".  In hindsight, the words "slippery slope" seem awfully apt to describe what happened next.  But what really fueled my practice was the discovery that my university had an anime and manga club that was willing to pay cold, hard cash for translations of manga and doujinshi on a per-page basis.  Once I realized that most of what they wanted was terrifying porn, cliched romances, and what my ex would've called "shonen battle sh*t", none of which was particularly dialog-heavy, I discovered that I could quickly rake in enough cash to cover my textbook expenses in the first three or so weeks of the semester and the rest went straight into my pocket and fueled my collecting of Macross stuff.  I was able to keep on that particular gravy train clear through to the end of graduate school, though it ultimately meant my proficiency is higher for written than spoken and my vocabulary's super lopsided.  I could probably hold my own in a seminar on nuclear physics and make a total arse of myself in a discussion of gardening.

All told, after I started learning it became a self-fueling hobby... but I've never taken a formal class in the language, unless you count the self-teaching tools like Rosetta Stone I'm using to polish my conversation Japanese and re-balance my vocabulary.

(IMO, as languages go it's less of a pain in the arse than most other languages I've studied, including Latin and German.)

 

1 hour ago, Master Dex said:

May be asking the wrong question there. More like why did the YF-29 require 4 engines and a huge chunk of fold quartz, the fold wave system, and a ton of MDE based weaponry before it could compare to a Federal spec fighter based on the parent design of all 5th gen fighters? Clearly Federal NUNS has access to reactor and engine tech WAY ahead of the stuff they allow the "colonials" to use.

Based on what's been said in Great Mechanics DX, Macross Chronicle, and a few magazine interviews and so on, the New UN Government and Earth/Federal New UN Forces had withheld a number of technological advances from the YF-24 specification they shared to the emigrant fleets and colonized planets.  Earth is essentially THE hotspot for new tech development, with General Galaxy's independent spacegoing laboratory Macross Galaxy as a distant second.  Earth's got something like twenty factory satellites to play with too.

Edited November 10, 2017 by Seto Kaiba

[Sir Galahad®]

So which do you think had more success, General Galaxy or Shinsei Industries in the development of VFs?

[Seto Kaiba]

7 minutes ago, Sir Galahad® said:

So which do you think had more success, General Galaxy or Shinsei Industries in the development of VFs?

Oh, Shinsei... hands down.

General Galaxy has only managed to win the competition to select the next main fighter ONCE with the VF-171.  Other than that, they've done mainly niche and special forces designs.

Every other main fighter has been a Shinsei program... either by the companies that merged to form it (like the VF-1 and VF-4), by Shinsei itself (VF-11, VF-19, VF-24), or Shinsei partnerships with local companies (VF-25, VF-31).  The same with many influential prototypes like the YF-29 and YF-30.

[SMS007]

http://www.macross2.net/m3/macrossf/yf-25.htm

Why does this YF-25 model have NUNS hull markings when the data lists it as an SMS craft? Speaking of which, when did it appear in Itsuwari no Utahime? I barely caught the half second that one appeared aboard Macross Quarter in Sayonara no Tsubasa.

On 11/8/2017 at 10:31 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

Outside of the Special Forces units, that was a pretty rare thing.  We can't speak to the organization of NUNS VF-25 squadrons in the Macross Frontier fleet, but we never saw any CF VF-25s except the VF-25A, and there were several different platoons worth of fighters around.

? Am I missing something? When has Frontier NUNS fielded the VF-25? I thought all they had was hordes upon hordes of the VF-171.

Edited November 10, 2017 by SMS007

[sketchley]

12 hours ago, Sildani said:

So, Sketchely and Seto: where’d your Nihongo education come from?

Short answer?  Took a year in H/S, a couple of years in university, attended a Japanese university for a few months, and have been living in Japan for approx. 14+ years.

If you are planning to take a stab on translating Macross, it helps to have a rudimentary background in the culture (for characters), and science or pseudo-science (for the mecha; if you can watch ST:TNG, DS9, etc. and get the gist of what they're saying when they speak in engineering jargon, you should have no problem with the Macross equivalent. ).

 

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All told, after I started learning it became a self-fueling hobby... but I've never taken a formal class in the language, unless you count the self-teaching tools like Rosetta Stone I'm using to polish my conversation Japanese and re-balance my vocabulary.

 

Have you tried the Duolingo App?  They've recently started rolling out language courses in Japanese and Korean (not sure if its all users, or just us in Japan).

If you can, you may find it extremely helpful in re-balancing your vocabulary (it's currently geared for tourists coming for the Tokyo olympics.  So, lots of everyday conversation.  The stuff that doesn't tend to crop up much in mecha translations!  ).

Edited November 10, 2017 by sketchley

[Seto Kaiba]

2 hours ago, SMS007 said:

http://www.macross2.net/m3/macrossf/yf-25.htm

Why does this YF-25 model have NUNS hull markings when the data lists it as an SMS craft?

Well, several reasons actually.

The first is that the Macross Chronicle mechanic sheet for the YF-25 Prophecy lists it as "attached to SMS", and the No.3 prototype was seen in the SMS Macross Quarter's hangar in Macross Frontier the Movie: The Wings of Goodbye.  Macross the Ride also shows the No.1 prototype being used by Chelsea Scarlett of SMS's Apollo Platoon after it'd already been extensively tested by the NUNS, incl. Chelsea's mentor Angers 672.

The reason they have NUNS markings is that they were aircraft built for, and largely operated by, the Macross Frontier fleet's New UN Spacy.  SMS was permitted to pilot them, but they belonged to the NUNS.... unlike the trial production VF-25s, which were on loan to the SMS branch.

 

2 hours ago, SMS007 said:

Speaking of which, when did it appear in Itsuwari no Utahime? I barely caught the half second that one appeared aboard Macross Quarter in Sayonara no Tsubasa.

It appeared as a toy in that public appearance Ranka did to promote the Dainamu Chogokin toys in the first Macross Frontier film.

Y'all got VF-X-4'd.

 

2 hours ago, SMS007 said:

? Am I missing something? When has Frontier NUNS fielded the VF-25? I thought all they had was hordes upon hordes of the VF-171.

By all accounts, they test-flew the YF-25s in 2057... but the production VF-25 wasn't ready for adoption by the fleet's NUNS until some point in the early 2060s.

Macross the Ride also puts a hundred and fifty or so VF-19EFs in their arsenal.

[SMS007]

Yack Deculture that's so meta. 

[Seto Kaiba]

9 hours ago, SMS007 said:

Yack Deculture that's so meta. 

Yeah, the YF-25 Prophecy's appearances have mainly been in supplementary material like light novels and video games.  Its only animated appearances have been as background filler in the Macross Frontier movies.

Chelsea Scarlett, Angers 672, and Reon Sakaki are the only known pilots thus far, the former two being from Macross the Ride and the latter from Macross 30... though IIRC Macross 30 offered both the Macross Frontier movie orange, blue, and white scheme and Reon Sakaki's SMS Sephira branch seafoam and white.

[Sir Galahad®]

Latest Generation Valkyries have 360 degree view when in Battroid. Were there specs like cameras and sensors that allow them to have this feature?

Edited November 11, 2017 by Sir Galahad®
Added image

[ManhattanProject972]

Do you guys think having your most powerful main sources of thrust on your feet, like pretty much every VF, is more advantageous than having it on your back like a YF-21/VF-22? 

 

[Valkyrie Driver]

Having the main source of thrust in the legs is probably more unstable (reference, MCU Iron Man), but is the easier option from a design perspective. Considering that the engines themselves are mostly contained within the lower legs of most Valkyries that seems to put a fair amount of weight in that area of the Battroid. That makes the weight distribution a bit more even, where the YF-21 and VF-22 are somewhat top heavy. 

All in all, I think it's better to have the engines in the legs. Instability lends a lot to maneuverability, so I think that's better.

[Seto Kaiba]

On 11/11/2017 at 12:33 AM, Sir Galahad® said:

Latest Generation Valkyries have 360 degree view when in Battroid. Were there specs like cameras and sensors that allow them to have this feature?

's actually a hardware item that was introduced on a production basis in the 4th Generation VFs, esp. the VF-19 Excalibur, which had it in all three modes rather than just in battroid.

When it was new (on the YF-19) there were notations about sensor systems scattered all around the airframe that work together to put together the composite image for the wraparound imaging monitor.  The big sensor clusters are visible even on the toys, as the colored insets on the sides or front of the nose, etc.  The YF-24 derivatives tend to have a bunch clustered around the canopy, while the VF-19 has ones that are a good 3-4 meters long on the sides of the nose.  The effect is achieved, AFAIK, by a matrix of optical, infrared, and laser-based camera systems.

 

 

9 hours ago, ManhattanProject972 said:

Do you guys think having your most powerful main sources of thrust on your feet, like pretty much every VF, is more advantageous than having it on your back like a YF-21/VF-22? 

I think the design with the engines in the lower legs was the easier one in terms of transformation complexity.  

The YF-21/VF-22 approach has some significant merits, like rendering the limbs disposable, but it also has some significant design issues like placement of a thrust source for VTOL in GERWALK mode... which had to be achieved by using bypass air from the main turbines, adding complexity to the engines and introducing some balancing issues with the lift source being positioned at the rear of the aircraft in GERWALK mode.

[Podtastic]

Do any of the Zentraedi combat mecha incorporate some form of AG in addition to all those boosters?  Given that they don't seem to rely on wings to keep their stuff in the air like the humans.

 

[Seto Kaiba]

8 hours ago, Podtastic said:

Do any of the Zentraedi combat mecha incorporate some form of AG in addition to all those boosters?  Given that they don't seem to rely on wings to keep their stuff in the air like the humans.

The reentry pod does, and some of the shuttles probably do, but other than that... nope.

They're staying up on raw thrust alone, which is fine because mostly they're designed for use in space.

[Sildani]

The Gnerl?

[Seto Kaiba]

13 minutes ago, Sildani said:

The Gnerl?

Flying on thrust.  It's mostly engine.

[Podtastic]

30 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Flying on thrust.  It's mostly engine.

Never mind dogfighting, how exactly do I land my Gnerl if my battlecruiser has landed or I'm stationed at a ground base?

It has skids.

 

[Seto Kaiba]

10 hours ago, Podtastic said:

Never mind dogfighting, how exactly do I land my Gnerl if my battlecruiser has landed or I'm stationed at a ground base?

It has skids.

Ground base?  The Zentradi Army is a fleet-based military organization for which the closest thing to a ground base is a space station large enough to more than justify hammy proclamations like "that's no moon, it's a space station"... an environment in which gravity is not a constant.

If I had to guess, I'd assume VTOL.  The Gnerl aerospace dogfighter pod has a number of massive high-powered verniers assisting its thrust-vectoring paddles in maneuvering, and one of them is on the underside directly below center mass.  Its position is very nearly ideal for VTOL use.

[Seto Kaiba]

Just picked up my copy of Macross Variable Fighter Designers Note over lunch, and it seems we're going to be able to glean a not-insignificant amount of usable art and some new information from this book after all.

One thing I did note is that my earlier statement about the YF-29's shoulder missile launchers being a toy feature is incorrect, they're represented in the line art but not mentioned in the official specs.  This would mean the YF-29 has about 130 missiles instead of 100.

Edited November 14, 2017 by Seto Kaiba

[Sildani]

Ooh! Ooh! Anything new about the VF-27?

[Seto Kaiba]

3 minutes ago, Sildani said:

Ooh! Ooh! Anything new about the VF-27?

Nope, the only material of interest for the VF-27 in Macross Variable Fighter Designers Note was the larger and cleaner reprinting of some of the (colored pencil?) early concepts for the VF-27 that were color inserts in the biography Shoji Kawamori: the View Point of Visionary Creator.  There's some of the VF-25 concepts from the same period included as well, with some of the Super/Armored Pack drafts that look straight out of a Rockman X game.

[SMS007]

I don't suppose there happens to be any information about the presumed VF-24? Or a production-model VF-29? 

Edited November 14, 2017 by SMS007

[Seto Kaiba]

4 minutes ago, SMS007 said:

And any further information about the presumed VF-24? Or a production-model VF-29? 

Nothing whatsoever.  It's almost exclusively an art book, the few pieces of text therein that aren't the handwritten notes the designer included on the original animation model sheets that the book reprinted are image identification captions the publisher put in that any Macross fan would almost certainly find to be entirely unnecessary.  

It also skips a lot of stuff, like the Macross II continuity VFs, the Varauta Army VFs and their NUNS design basis, the Spiritia Dreaming VF-14, the Variable Glaug, Neo Glaug, Feios Valkyrie, all the recently-canonized Advanced Valkyrie designs, everything from Macross 30 except the YF-30, etc.  It's not a bad book, but it could've been a LOT better with relatively little work.

I'll say this though, it does contain a good clean version of the YF-24 Evolution multiview graphic from the Macross Frontier series... and at a size larger than "postage stamp" too!