Super Macross Mecha Fun Time Discussion Thread!

[Valkyrie Driver]

Aside from the cost and instability of the BDI system, what exactly caused the YF-19 to be chosen over the YF-21? Watching the expanded dogfight between Guld and Isamu in the Plus Movie, the two fighters seemed pretty evenly matched. 

[Seto Kaiba]

8 minutes ago, Valkyrie Driver said:

Aside from the cost and instability of the BDI system, what exactly caused the YF-19 to be chosen over the YF-21? Watching the expanded dogfight between Guld and Isamu in the Plus Movie, the two fighters seemed pretty evenly matched. 

Macross Chronicle's Mechanic Sheet 01B "VF Masterpieces seen from their Development Ancestry" points to the YF-19's greater level of design completion vs. the YF-21 as the key factor that led to the New UN Forces declaring it the victor of the Project Super Nova competition.

Essentially, the YF-19 No.2 prototype was more-or-less a production-ready aircraft based on more conventional, but highly refined, technologies where the YF-21 had adopted more new technology that hadn't been fully tested and/or was still unreliable like the BDI system.

 

That's been General Galaxy's stumbling block ever since the company was founded in 2017.  Their design engineers didn't seem to quite understand that the military was less interested in having all the latest bleeding-edge technology in its main fighters than it was in having the main fighter be a ruggedly dependable mecha that was easy to maintain.  Shinsei Industry persistently beat them in design competitions because Shinsei's designs were less radical.  General Galaxy only seems like it finally noticed what was going on in the late 2040s, when they finally gave the New UN Spacy just what it'd asked for: a rock-solid, ruggedly dependable, jack-of-all-trades VF based only on proven tech that met requirements without going overboard on feature content... the VF-171 Nightmare Plus.  That was the first and only time they beat Shinsei, and thereafter they were back to taking cheap shots at Shinsei behind their backs.

[JB0]

On 11/22/2017 at 4:25 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

Well, arguably that promotion was the real punishment.  They kicked him upstairs to minimize his opportunities for getting into trouble by the simple expedient of chaining him to a desk. 

"And this time we're not stripping your rank as a disciplinary action!"

"Welp, there goes plans A through P."

 

 

 

Edit: Also, I like the inversion of the Admiral Kirk thing. At the end of Trek IV, Kirk gets busted from admiral all the way back to captain as "punishment" for saving the world after commiting numerous crimes, and released from his desk shackles.   And Isamu gets promoted as a reward for saving the world after commiting numerous crimes, and chained to a desk.

Edited November 24, 2017 by JB0

[ManhattanProject972]

In a fight between a VF-27 and an Sv-262 who do you think would come out on top? 

A VF-27 can go toe to toe with a YF-29 when it has an unmanned drone bolted onto its back but I guess the same can be said of the Sv-262 and its drones seem to have better functionality when attached, acting as pivoting engine pods like a YF-29, giving it the ability to change vectors rather quickly without the need to transform. And the Lil Drakens also seem like a more effective force multiplier by themselves seeing as there are two of them and their armament is better than the VF-27's Goblin which only has missile ports.

[JB0]

9 minutes ago, ManhattanProject972 said:

In a fight between a VF-27 and an Sv-262 who do you think would come out on top? 

The viewers, if the pilots are competent.

Edited November 24, 2017 by JB0

[Seto Kaiba]

On 11/22/2017 at 9:40 PM, JB0 said:

Edit: Also, I like the inversion of the Admiral Kirk thing. At the end of Trek IV, Kirk gets busted from admiral all the way back to captain as "punishment" for saving the world after commiting numerous crimes, and released from his desk shackles.   And Isamu gets promoted as a reward for saving the world after commiting numerous crimes, and chained to a desk.

Yeah, though at least Isamu got chained to a desk in the best posting he ever landed.

Kathryn Janeway, however, got the same "reward" with none of the actual benefits in Star Trek.  Kicked upstairs and chained to a desk at Starfleet Headquarters to keep her well clear of anything resembling a starship, in the hopes that it'd prevent her from wreaking the kind of havoc she perpetrated on her rampage back to the Alpha quadrant.  (Then, in the wake of her death and resurrection by the Q, they banished her back to the Delta quadrant in the hopes that "anywhere but here" would compartmentalize the damage.)

 

 

8 hours ago, ManhattanProject972 said:

In a fight between a VF-27 and an Sv-262 who do you think would come out on top? 

*looks at the most iconic pilots for each*

The fujoshi.

 

8 hours ago, ManhattanProject972 said:

A VF-27 can go toe to toe with a YF-29 when it has an unmanned drone bolted onto its back but I guess the same can be said of the Sv-262 and its drones seem to have better functionality when attached, acting as pivoting engine pods like a YF-29, giving it the ability to change vectors rather quickly without the need to transform. And the Lil Drakens also seem like a more effective force multiplier by themselves seeing as there are two of them and their armament is better than the VF-27's Goblin which only has missile ports.

My money's on the VF-27.

Looking at the specs without any add-on parts, the General Galaxy VF-27 Lucifer has several distinct advantages over the Dian Cecht Sv-262 Draken III.  The VF-27's T/W ratio is about 15% higher than the Sv-262's, its four engines have a more flexible thrust vectoring arrangement, it doesn't suffer from transformation-related problems with fuel capacity.  The VF-27 also has a HUGE advantage in that, even though the Sv-262 has a better ISC system, its pilot can control the aircraft directly with their mind and, being a cyborg with superior g-force resistance, can exploit the fighter's engine power to a greater extent than the fleshy meats in the Sv-262's cockpit can.

Armaments-wise, they're about on par, though the Lilldrakens are not nearly as flexible as the Goblin II drone the VF-27 has, which can be directly controlled by the VF-27's pilot while they're flying the VF-27.

 

 

7 hours ago, JB0 said:

The viewers, if the pilots are competent.

Word.

[Sildani]

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

The fujoshi.

BWAHAHAHHAHAHA!!!

Too damn funny!

[Valkyrie Driver]

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

My money's on the VF-27.

Looking at the specs without any add-on parts, the General Galaxy VF-27 Lucifer has several distinct advantages over the Dian Cecht Sv-262 Draken III.  The VF-27's T/W ratio is about 15% higher than the Sv-262's, its four engines have a more flexible thrust vectoring arrangement, it doesn't suffer from transformation-related problems with fuel capacity.  The VF-27 also has a HUGE advantage in that, even though the Sv-262 has a better ISC system, its pilot can control the aircraft directly with their mind and, being a cyborg with superior g-force resistance, can exploit the fighter's engine power to a greater extent than the fleshy meats in the Sv-262's cockpit can.

Armaments-wise, they're about on par, though the Lilldrakens are not nearly as flexible as the Goblin II drone the VF-27 has, which can be directly controlled by the VF-27's pilot while they're flying the VF-27.

You mentioned that the pilot of the VF-27 would be a cyborg. Are the Cyborgs in Macross Frontier basically cut and paste full prosthetics ala Ghost in the Shell? Or are they the full range of cybernetically enhanced humans? Does the VF-27 absolutely require a cyborg pilot, or is that just the norm?

[SMS007]

The cyborg operator is the default specification for Galaxy NUNS's VF-27s in Macross Frontier, as Macross Galaxy's amoral leadership forced everyone in the fleet to adopt cybernetics at their whim. Some later civilian-owned VF-27s, as seen in Macross 30 and Macross Extra, appear to have been modified to allow for purely organic operators. (Hávamál and SMS Uroboros in the Macross 30 game also field VF-27s, but Seto Kaiba says that aspect of the game is of dubious canonicity)

As for how extensive cyberneticization is in Macross, it's ambiguous exactly how high the percentage is. I want to say Macross Galaxy's cyborgs have more of their original body than just their brains, but when Grace got shot up by Frontier NUNS in Sayonara no Tsubasa, she was leaking mechanical fluid from all over her body, no red blood in sight. 

[Seto Kaiba]

24 minutes ago, Valkyrie Driver said:

You mentioned that the pilot of the VF-27 would be a cyborg. Are the Cyborgs in Macross Frontier basically cut and paste full prosthetics ala Ghost in the Shell? Or are they the full range of cybernetically enhanced humans? Does the VF-27 absolutely require a cyborg pilot, or is that just the norm?

Based on the description in Macross Chronicle and their appearances in Macross media including Macross VF-X2's novelization, Macross Frontier, Macross the Ride, Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy, and Macross E, cyborgs in the Macross universe run the full gamut of levels of modification.  The most common extent of cybernetic implant adoption is a relatively low-key adoption of non-visible network implants ala Ghost in the Shell, that just connect up the brain to netcom hardware.  Virtually every citizen of the Macross Galaxy fleet has this level of cybernetics, with the noteworthy exception of Sheryl Nome, and that was what facilitated mind control over the fleet.  Others, like Oscar Brauhitsch from Macross R had basic mechanical replacement limbs or organs to repair old injuries.  Very few had any kind of performance-enhancing hardware, like Nicolas Berthier's fiberoptic nervous system upgrades.

The "cyber grunts" of the Macross Galaxy corporate army were the most extreme adopters, being either Ghost in the Shell-style full body prosthetic replacement or so close to it as to make no odds.  That kind of cybernetic operation was technically illegal, and its illegality the reason for military-grade EX-Gear's existence.  It's noted that the VF-27 has an ISC as an unavoidable concession to the fact that one of the few remaining organic components in the pilot is the brain.  The VF-27 could theoretically be operated by an unaugmented human using the conventional (backup) controls after the armored shield on the canopy was ejected (at great risk of injury or death, since the usual limiters aren't in place), but to realize its full combat potential the pilot must be a specially g-hardened military-grade cyborg... something only obtainable through the Macross Galaxy military or through the expenditure of a truly incredibly amount of money (ike Ivan Tsari did in Macross E).

[SMS007]

Hey Seto Kaiba, you have previously stated that the YF-29 is the only fighter model to compare with the ultra-OP VF-24. Is it your conjecture then, that the YF-29 is superior to the VF-27 in combat capability? My perception of the climax of Sayonara no Tsubasa is that Alto only managed to avoid getting shot down by Brera because Ranka's fold singing disrupted Brera's concentration. 

[Seto Kaiba]

59 minutes ago, SMS007 said:

Hey Seto Kaiba, you have previously stated that the YF-29 is the only fighter model to compare with the ultra-OP VF-24.

Yeah, that's what a few books like Great Mechanics DX and the Macross Frontier: Sayonara no Tsubasa Official Complete Book have suggested... that the YF-29 was developed by the Macross Frontier branches of Shinsei Industry and L.A.I. in a bid to surpass the YF-24 Evolution.

 

59 minutes ago, SMS007 said:

Is it your conjecture then, that the YF-29 is superior to the VF-27 in combat capability? My perception of the climax of Sayonara no Tsubasa is that Alto only managed to avoid getting shot down by Brera because Ranka's fold singing disrupted Brera's concentration. 

Macross Chronicle's Macross Frontier movie mechanic sheets for the VF-27γ Super Lucifer and YF-29 Durandal both generally agree that the YF-29 is the superior aircraft in terms of mobility and combat capability.  That said, the VF-27γ Super Lucifer is also described as having abilities approaching those of the YF-29.  Its AIF-9V Ghost escorts are described as a craft that normally enjoys an overpowering advantage over normal VFs but found themselves on the receiving end of a similarly one-sided fight against the YF-29.

The YF-29 definitely has more weaponry than the VF-27γSP, thanks to that MDE beam cannon turret and the hundred-plus micro-missiles it carries internally even without its Super Packs.  

My read of the scene is that the fight was that Alto wasn't really trying in his fight with Brera.  He takes almost no shots at Brera himself, he just shoots down Brera's Ghosts almost casually and then spends the rest of the dogfight in a vain effort to talk Brera into breaking free of mind control.  It's pretty evident that killing Brera wasn't an option on the table in his assessment.

[Sir Galahad®]

Are a majority of Zentradi weapons energy based? I mean the guns that the Regult and the Glaug seem to be non-projectile in nature. I mean even the rifle that Alto Picked up during his exam was energy based as well.

[Seto Kaiba]

1 minute ago, Sir Galahad® said:

Are a majority of Zentradi weapons energy based?

Yes.  As far as we know, the Zentradi Army doesn't have any weapons that use hard rounds.  

Their infantry-issue "small" arms are all either laser weapons or electron particle beam weapons.  Battle pods and battle suits use a mixture of electron particle beam weapons, laser machine guns of various types, impact cannons (an unspecified type of beam weapon I suspect is a dimensional beam weapon), and the occasional plasma cannon.  Missiles are the only non-energy weapons they have unless you want to count the lances and halberds used by the Mardook's Zentradi battle suits in Macross II, and those had beam weapons built into them.  Their starships are armed exclusively with heavy quantum reaction beam cannons of various scales and missile launcher turrets.

The only time we've seen Zentradi using solid-ammo weapons that were actually intended for them (not counting Klan's... stunt) is in the original series, when we see Quamzin's rebels using what appears to be a giant-scale pump-action shotgun that was almost certainly made on Earth.

 

1 minute ago, Sir Galahad® said:

I mean the guns that the Regult and the Glaug seem to be non-projectile in nature. I mean even the rifle that Alto Picked up during his exam was energy based as well.

Yep.  The Regult's main guns are electron particle beam guns, and the smaller guns are laser machine guns.  The Glaug's got four impact cannons, two chin-mounted lasers, and the big electron beam gun.

[Sir Galahad®]

If that is the case, how would you rate Zentradi firepower against a Vajra Heavy Soldier? As far as I know while the GU-17A was effective against the mobile soldier, it was ineffective against the Heavy Soldier using their usual pre-MDE weaponry.

And how effective was MDE bullets against Vajra Armor?

[Seto Kaiba]

3 minutes ago, Sir Galahad® said:

If that is the case, how would you rate Zentradi firepower against a Vajra Heavy Soldier?

I'd assume, based on the performance of the General Galaxy Queadluun-Rhea/56 units deployed by Strategic Military Services in Macross Frontier, that sustained laser machine gun fire could penetrate the armor of the Vajra heavy soldier type if it found a weak spot like a joint.  Those guns should be roughly comparable to the equivalent laser machine guns on the Gnerl, Queadluun-Rau, and so on. 

Based on Alto's performance, to get through the armor by simple brute force you'd need repeated direct hits from a medium or large-bore impact cannon like the ones on the Glaug and Nosjadeul-Ger.  The big plasma gun on the Nousjadeul-Ger might be able to get through it as well.

Missiles seem to be more effective, at least initially.

 

3 minutes ago, Sir Galahad® said:

As far as I know while the GU-17A was effective against the mobile soldier, it was ineffective against the Heavy Soldier using their usual pre-MDE weaponry.

The GU-17A was effective against the Vajra mobile and heavy soldiers initially, though against the heavy soldiers sustained fire was necessary to guarantee a kill.  Once they went to more powerful anti-ECA rounds that were intended for anti-Vajra use rather than standard anti-VF use ammo c. Episode 7 they were reliably able to score kills on Vajra heavy soldier units until the Vajra adapted their armor to resist anti-ECA rounds.  Then they switched to MDE shells.

 

3 minutes ago, Sir Galahad® said:

And how effective was MDE bullets against Vajra Armor?

Very... though the Frontier fleet anticipated that the Vajra would adapt to MDE shells eventually, given the opportunity, and hence they opted to jam Vajra hive mind communications in the area when MDE-equipped VFs sortied.

[SMS007]

Where the hell do the Vajra get all their supplies from? The TV anime expects us to believe that after a few encounters with Macross Frontier every single Vajra in the galaxy started growing anti-reaction detonation armor. How? No one in the universe could possibly have infinite resources! 

Edited November 27, 2017 by SMS007

[Master Dex]

2 minutes ago, SMS007 said:

Where the hell do the Vajra get all their supplies from? The TV anime expects us to believe that after a few encounters with Macross Frontier every single Vajra in the galaxy started growing anti-reaction detonation armor. How? No one in the universe could possibly have infinite resources! 

They share information instantaneously through fold space communications. All Vajra are like synapses of a large brain with the queens as local control nodes. As for their 'resources' they literally grow their armor. They are basically doing evolutionary adaptation of a super fast scale thanks to fold hive communication. If you mean where does the mass the Vajra grow come from? Well presumably they have to consume raw materials.. but it isn't like those are hard to find since they can zero-time-lag fold almost anywhere they want thanks to growing fold quartz in their bodies. They can use fallen enemy materials, raw materials from planets, asteroids, etc.

[SMS007]

10 minutes ago, Master Dex said:

They share information instantaneously through fold space communications. All Vajra are like synapses of a large brain with the queens as local control nodes.

That has nothing to do with my question. I mean physical resources, not data. You can have all the knowledge in the world but without supplies you can't put the data to use.

[Seto Kaiba]

32 minutes ago, SMS007 said:

Where the hell do the Vajra get all their supplies from? The TV anime expects us to believe that after a few encounters with Macross Frontier every single Vajra in the galaxy started growing anti-reaction detonation armor. How? No one in the universe could possibly have infinite resources! 

Oh, all over the place.  Multiple Macross titles have depicted Vajra swarms nesting both in space and planetside, and we've seen them nesting in all kinds of places like on planetary surfaces, on ancient Protoculture orbital megastructures, on asteroids, inside their starship-analogues (which are themselves living Vajra organisms), and inside wrecked starships of Human and Zentradi origin.

The Macross Frontier TV series gave us at least one shot of a Vajra heavy soldier digging in an asteroid for raw fold quartz, so it's logical to assume the Vajra are mining asteroids or collecting necessary resources from the environments in which they build their nests.  I'd also assume that, given the opportunity, they recycle the bodies of their dead to recover all the processed materials that were synthesized by the hive's queen (e.g. the refined fold quartz) or those that are processed using the Vajra's own biology like the fold carbon in their heavy quantum beam weapons and the materials in their energy conversion armor shells.  That might also explain their apparent propensity for nesting in wrecked starships, since a wrecked fold-capable starship is going to be a rich deposit of silicates, refined metals, and fold carbon from the ship's various fold devices¹.

The Vajra's adaptation against thermonuclear reaction warheads seems to have been just retaining extra layers of exoskeletal armor and letting them ablate away in the heat of the thermonuclear detonation, possibly by changing the molting pattern to produce a thicker exoskeleton (assuming Vajra molt like some large Earth insects).

 

1. Such as the Gravity Inertia Control systems inside its thermonuclear reactors (AKA fold reactors), the ship's main gravity control system clusters, fold system clusters, fold wave radar, fold communications systems, heavy quantum reaction beam weaponry, and in the case of the human ships potentially thermonuclear reaction warhead trigger mechanisms.

[Podtastic]

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

I'd assume, based on the performance of the General Galaxy Queadluun-Rhea/56 units deployed by Strategic Military Services in Macross Frontier, that sustained laser machine gun fire could penetrate the armor of the Vajra heavy soldier type if it found a weak spot like a joint.  Those guns should be roughly comparable to the equivalent laser machine guns on the Gnerl, Queadluun-Rau, and so on. 

Based on Alto's performance, to get through the armor by simple brute force you'd need repeated direct hits from a medium or large-bore impact cannon like the ones on the Glaug and Nosjadeul-Ger.  The big plasma gun on the Nousjadeul-Ger might be able to get through it as well.

Missiles seem to be more effective, at least initially.

 

The GU-17A was effective against the Vajra mobile and heavy soldiers initially, though against the heavy soldiers sustained fire was necessary to guarantee a kill.  Once they went to more powerful anti-ECA rounds that were intended for anti-Vajra use rather than standard anti-VF use ammo c. Episode 7 they were reliably able to score kills on Vajra heavy soldier units until the Vajra adapted their armor to resist anti-ECA rounds.  Then they switched to MDE shells.

 

Very... though the Frontier fleet anticipated that the Vajra would adapt to MDE shells eventually, given the opportunity, and hence they opted to jam Vajra hive mind communications in the area when MDE-equipped VFs sortied.

So how effective would a Zentraedi assault rifle with an MDE mag be against Valkyries and battroids? I remember Kamjin shooting down a Valkyrie with an infantry assault rifle in one of the later episodes of SDFM.

And speaking of Zentraedi infantry weapons is there any data on the weapons we see those Zentraedi soldiers using in Delta? One appeared to be some type of laser and the other a kinetic weapon.

Edited November 27, 2017 by Podtastic

[Seto Kaiba]

Just now, Podtastic said:

So how effective would a Zentraedi assault rifle with an MDE mag be against Valkyries and battroids? I remember Kamjin shooting down a Valkyrie with an infantry assault rifle in one of the later episodes of SDFM.

Pretty sure I know the episode you're thinking of, and he did that with a GU-11[A] gunpod he nicked from one of the VF-1A battroids he beat up.  Those 55mm HEACA rounds would understandably mess a VF-1 battroid up pretty badly since they were more than a little bit overkill.  (But hey, there's no kill like overkill.)

The Zentradi Army standard issue infantry rifles are laser or electron particle beam weapons, only dimensional beam weapons can be upgraded to MDE specification.

 

Just now, Podtastic said:

And speaking of Zentraedi infantry weapons is there any data on the weapons we see those Zentraedi soldiers using in Delta?

I'd assume they're probably laser or electron particle beam rifles, similar to Zentradi Army standard field issue.

[azrael]

1 hour ago, SMS007 said:

That has nothing to do with my question. I mean physical resources, not data. You can have all the knowledge in the world but without supplies you can't put the data to use.

They find stuff. They collect stuff. They eat stuff. Their bodies could process the stuff then their bodies (somehow) get rid of it so they can form their nests. They also use stuff that's already lying around. Bees have glands that break down sugar in honey to form wax. That wax gets secreted from the bee's body and the bee molds it to form parts of the nest. Ants move dirt around grain by grain to build their nest. Beavers find twigs, branches, stones, etc. and then pack it together with mud to build their homes. I'm pretty sure Vajra, in all their millennias of existence, know how to collect, process, and build their nests from the many environments they encounter.

[Master Dex]

6 hours ago, SMS007 said:

That has nothing to do with my question. I mean physical resources, not data. You can have all the knowledge in the world but without supplies you can't put the data to use.

Aside from all the other answers now which are basically the same thing that I said in more detail, you cleverly cropped out the rest of what I said where I continue to actually answer the question. Helps to read all of the post. Oh well, everyone else seemed to come to the same conclusion anyway. 

[Podtastic]

On 26/11/2017 at 9:59 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

Pretty sure I know the episode you're thinking of, and he did that with a GU-11[A] gunpod he nicked from one of the VF-1A battroids he beat up.  Those 55mm HEACA rounds would understandably mess a VF-1 battroid up pretty badly since they were more than a little bit overkill.  (But hey, there's no kill like overkill.)

The Zentradi Army standard issue infantry rifles are laser or electron particle beam weapons, only dimensional beam weapons can be upgraded to MDE specification.

 

I'd assume they're probably laser or electron particle beam rifles, similar to Zentradi Army standard field issue.

Actually he shot the valkyrie down with a standard Zentraedi assault rifle.

The GU11 incident ( I think l haven't checked) is when he was riding the Monster.

Ah yes indeed this happened on top of the Monster, which explains why Kamjin was unarmed at the start of the fight.

Edited November 29, 2017 by Podtastic
Update

[SMS007]

12 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Oh, all over the place.  Multiple Macross titles have depicted Vajra swarms nesting both in space and planetside, and we've seen them nesting in all kinds of places like on planetary surfaces, on ancient Protoculture orbital megastructures, on asteroids, inside their starship-analogues (which are themselves living Vajra organisms), and inside wrecked starships of Human and Zentradi origin.

The Macross Frontier TV series gave us at least one shot of a Vajra heavy soldier digging in an asteroid for raw fold quartz, so it's logical to assume the Vajra are mining asteroids or collecting necessary resources from the environments in which they build their nests.  I'd also assume that, given the opportunity, they recycle the bodies of their dead to recover all the processed materials that were synthesized by the hive's queen (e.g. the refined fold quartz) or those that are processed using the Vajra's own biology like the fold carbon in their heavy quantum beam weapons and the materials in their energy conversion armor shells.  That might also explain their apparent propensity for nesting in wrecked starships, since a wrecked fold-capable starship is going to be a rich deposit of silicates, refined metals, and fold carbon from the ship's various fold devices¹.

The Vajra's adaptation against thermonuclear reaction warheads seems to have been just retaining extra layers of exoskeletal armor and letting them ablate away in the heat of the thermonuclear detonation, possibly by changing the molting pattern to produce a thicker exoskeleton (assuming Vajra molt like some large Earth insects).

 

1. Such as the Gravity Inertia Control systems inside its thermonuclear reactors (AKA fold reactors), the ship's main gravity control system clusters, fold system clusters, fold wave radar, fold communications systems, heavy quantum reaction beam weaponry, and in the case of the human ships potentially thermonuclear reaction warhead trigger mechanisms.

Well now. How convenient for the Vajra. 

[Valkyrie Driver]

55 minutes ago, SMS007 said:

Well now. How convenient for the Vajra. 

Space isn't just an empty void. It's full of stuff. I mean, It's plausible, especially considering that a single particular Vajra can be born and die in space, without ever landing on a planet, so they obviously don't require an atmosphere. I'm curious to know how they respirate, I'm assuming that they use hydrogen for respiration, considering how abundant it is, and how it's just there in space. 

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, SMS007 said:

Well now. How convenient for the Vajra. 

Let's face it, the Vajra had an incredibly long head start on every spacefaring civilization to emerge in the Milky Way in Macross.  They had already long since become an intergalactic "society" at the point in time when the ancient Protoculture was just starting to figure out fire.  They've had a few eons of self-guided evolution to optimize themselves and their lifestyle for living in space.

They've been around for so long as a spacefaring and highly capable species that it's very strongly implied that the Vajra are the true origin of many of the advanced technologies that humanity has come to collectively know as Overtechnology.  It's highly probable the Protoculture discovered the basics of super dimension spatial theory while studying the Vajra, and from that (and possibly the study of Vajra anatomy) were able to reverse-engineer many of the Vajra's anatomical traits with pure technology to create things like fold systems, artificial gravity, dimensional weapons, and an array of other advancements.  We do know that the Regult and Glaug are both modeled on Vajra larval forms, and the Birdhuman was modeled on a Vajra queen.  It's speculated the Protoculture based their Zentradi warship designs either on the Vahla Ena (space whales) or possibly on Vajra warship forms.

 

26 minutes ago, Valkyrie Driver said:

Space isn't just an empty void. It's full of stuff. I mean, It's plausible, especially considering that a single particular Vajra can be born and die in space, without ever landing on a planet, so they obviously don't require an atmosphere. I'm curious to know how they respirate, I'm assuming that they use hydrogen for respiration, considering how abundant it is, and how it's just there in space. 

One has to wonder, given that they power themselves with fold dimensional energy conversion, if their anatomy even requires what we'd consider conventional cellular respiration.

Come to that, if one wants to split hairs, is the Vajra really the insectoid biological lifeform or the distributed consciousness residing in fold space for which all the Vajra insect forms are individual neurons in its brain?  Is it possible that the consciousness existed first via the fold bacteria and chose the insectoid Vajra as a host?

Edited November 27, 2017 by Seto Kaiba

[azrael]

1 hour ago, Valkyrie Driver said:

Space isn't just an empty void. It's full of stuff.

Just keep in mind there's A LOT of empty space in-between all the fun stuff, relatively speaking (As the Doctor would say, one corner of one country on one continent on one planet that's a corner of a galaxy that's a corner of a universe...).

[Seto Kaiba]

12 minutes ago, azrael said:

Just keep in mind there's A LOT of empty space in-between all the fun stuff, relatively speaking (As the Doctor would say, one corner of one country on one continent on one planet that's a corner of a galaxy that's a corner of a universe...).

"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."
-Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

[Valkyrie Driver]

1 hour ago, azrael said:

Just keep in mind there's A LOT of empty space in-between all the fun stuff, relatively speaking (As the Doctor would say, one corner of one country on one continent on one planet that's a corner of a galaxy that's a corner of a universe...).

I was mostly talking about the microscopic stuff. the dust, the elemental hydrogen just floating about. 

[SMS007]

The Vajra's sublight propulsion still makes not a lick of sense. How does it make any sense that they "swim" in a vacuum?

Edited November 27, 2017 by SMS007

[Seto Kaiba]

4 minutes ago, Valkyrie Driver said:

I was mostly talking about the microscopic stuff. the dust, the elemental hydrogen just floating about. 

Outside of a system's Oort cloud, the available matter in the interstellar medium is painfully diffuse... in some environments it's projected to be less than one particle per cubic centimeter.  This is one of the reasons the Bussard ramjet isn't considered a realistically viable interstellar propulsion system.¹

It's easier by far to collect pre-accreted material from larger in-system or rogue stellar bodies such as comets, asteroids, moons, and planets.  Going in-system also offers more diverse materials and heavier elements than are normally found in the interstellar medium, the byproducts of the fusion reactions of the dead stars whose remains re-accreted to form those systems.  They have a great incentive to go in-system too, since the naturally occurring fold carbon is said to be a product of a star's death.

 

1. Also the reason Bussard ramjets aren't used in Macross, and why the Bussard collectors on starships in Star Trek are only used to supplement and VERY slowly minimally replenish a ship's cryotank-stored deuterium or tritium fuel slush while operating away from supply depots.  (Despite being profoundly inefficient, they're still better than the process they're using to make antideuterium or antitritium... the Federation's main fuel depot for antimatter is a solar-powered quantum phase inverter on Mercury.)

[Seto Kaiba]

11 minutes ago, SMS007 said:

The Vajra's sublight propulsion still makes not a lick of sense. How does it make any sense that they "swim" in a vacuum?

Per Macross Chronicle¹, their tails are essentially a large biological gravitational field propeller.  (I can only assume the tail's "wagging" is involved in shaping the distortions to achieve unidirectional force.)

Essentially, a Vajra has a very low-powered warp drive growing out of its butt.

 

1. Mechanic Sheet Macross Frontier: the Movie ETC 04A "Vajra".

Edited November 27, 2017 by Seto Kaiba

[SMS007]

54 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Outside of a system's Oort cloud, the available matter in the interstellar medium is painfully diffuse... in some environments it's projected to be less than one particle per cubic centimeter.  This is one of the reasons the Bussard ramjet isn't considered a realistically viable interstellar propulsion system.¹

It's easier by far to collect pre-accreted material from larger in-system or rogue stellar bodies such as comets, asteroids, moons, and planets.  Going in-system also offers more diverse materials and heavier elements than are normally found in the interstellar medium, the byproducts of the fusion reactions of the dead stars whose remains re-accreted to form those systems.  They have a great incentive to go in-system too, since the naturally occurring fold carbon is said to be a product of a star's death.

 

1. Also the reason Bussard ramjets aren't used in Macross, and why the Bussard collectors on starships in Star Trek are only used to supplement and VERY slowly minimally replenish a ship's cryotank-stored deuterium or tritium fuel slush while operating away from supply depots.  (Despite being profoundly inefficient, they're still better than the process they're using to make antideuterium or antitritium... the Federation's main fuel depot for antimatter is a solar-powered quantum phase inverter on Mercury.)

Heh. One wonders, assuming that the Vajra actually developed all of their science and technology on their own, how long they had to spend charting their core sectors, unlike humans having access to at least some Zentradi navigational data. 

The story of Star Trek (or at least once they finally get past their TOS 23rd century stagnation) depends on the human-dominated Federation acquiring technology from all sorts of sources rather than independently developing things on their own. Vulcans, extinct ancient civilizations, future-originating time travelers, etc.

Edited November 27, 2017 by SMS007