Minmei Attack : Weakness

[cheemingwan1234]

Okay, what weakness does the Minmei Attack has and how would you hard counter a Minmei Attack if you are a Zentraedi Main Fleet commander?

Well, if you are trained to ignore/resist the effects of such an attack....I'm pretty sure you can trace the transmission of the music to the source *and then blow it up as a viable option.

 

*If the enemy get into your comms,..it is possible to trace said intrusion back  to the source and then counterattack.

Edited September 15, 2022 by cheemingwan1234

[Seto Kaiba]

34 minutes ago, cheemingwan1234 said:

Okay, what weakness does the Minmei Attack has and how would you hard counter a Minmei Attack if you are a Zentraedi Main Fleet commander?

One reason the Minmay Attack is so consistently effective is that the Zentradi don't really have a way to "hard counter" it successfully.

Any military force on the battlefield needs to be able to communicate to fight effectively, and the Zentradi are not only not an exception but an extreme case given how masssive the forces they deploy are.  The Minmay Attack works by leveraging the Zentradi fleet's own communications infrastructure against it to deliver the Minmay Attack to all ships and pods in range through their own communications channels.  

They could shut off their communications or institute wide area jamming on all frequencies, but that would render them blind and probably lead to them doing more damage to their own forces than the enemy.

 

34 minutes ago, cheemingwan1234 said:

Well, if you are trained to ignore/resist the effects of such an attack....

Which would require the Zentradi to have, and understand, artifacts of culture in their fleets... something the Protoculture expressly forbade them.  A prohibition their own kind enforce rather violently.  (If you recall, Boddole Zer's response to some of his branch fleets being exposed to Earth's culture was to order them destroyed alongside the Earth.)

Mind you, there have been two Macross stories that've tried this plot.  

Macross II: Lovers Again prequel Macross 2036 had the Zentradi Neld main fleet show up to finish with the Boddole Zer main fleet started with troops resistant to the Minmay Attack thanks to the guidance of a not-quite-dead Quamzin who legged it into space after that timeline's equivalent of the original series "Two Years After" arc.  The Neld Fleet still lost to a Minmay Attack in the end because resistance wasn't the same as immunity.  Macross: Eternal Love Song, in that same timeline, had Quamzin try to weaponize humanity and their Minmay Attack against a Meltrandi fleet thanks to a Protoculture communications device that encrypted their communications in non-standard ways so the Minmay Attack wasn't able to reach the Zentradi Burado main fleet initially.  The Spacy eventually developed a countermeasure and the Minmay Attack succeeded there as well.

 

34 minutes ago, cheemingwan1234 said:

I'm pretty sure you can trace the transmission of the music to the source *and then blow it up as a viable option.

 

 

*If the enemy get into your comms,..it is possible to trace said intrusion back  to the source and then counterattack.

Assuming you can still communicate to your forces through the de facto jamming the Minmay Attack represents and reach someone who's uncompromised enough to follow them.

[Big s]

12 hours ago, cheemingwan1234 said:

Okay, what weakness does the Minmei Attack has and how would you hard counter a Minmei Attack if you are a Zentraedi Main Fleet commander?

Well, if you are trained to ignore/resist the effects of such an attack....I'm pretty sure you can trace the transmission of the music to the source *and then blow it up as a viable option.

 

*If the enemy get into your comms,..it is possible to trace said intrusion back  to the source and then counterattack.

Ear muffs

[JB0]

3 hours ago, Big s said:

Ear muffs

Baby photos. Did you SEE what the tiniest Jenius did to those soldiers?

[DewPoint]

Perhaps you all haven't sat in your Regults lately...  But I don't recall there being enough room in there to remove your helmet and put on your ear muffs. Unless you plan on opening up the hatch... 

[pengbuzz]

Beastie Boys Hello Nasty Album

 

[Seto Kaiba]

On 9/16/2022 at 1:26 AM, JB0 said:

Baby photos. Did you SEE what the tiniest Jenius did to those soldiers?

Not to mention the live footage of Minmay kissing Kaifun... something off-putting and unnatural to the gender-segregated Zentradi and anyone who's met Kaifun before.

[pengbuzz]

4 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Not to mention the live footage of Minmay kissing Kaifun... something off-putting and unnatural to the gender-segregated Zentradi and anyone who's met Kaifun before.

Not to mention with the way he drinks, the mere thought of kissing his drunk caboose would make anyone gag.

[Dynaman]

The Zentradi themselves can't do a thing.  They have no technical skills whatsoever, even those that would be required to fight seem to only be instilled to do exactly what they need to do and nothing else (tuning a radio for instance - I think they are shown tuning one in at one point but they don't seem to be able to use that ability to keep out transmissions they do not want).  

If someone is helping the Zents they could implement scambled transmission systems.  That would take care of any kind of outside transmission.

[Seto Kaiba]

13 minutes ago, Dynaman said:

The Zentradi themselves can't do a thing.  They have no technical skills whatsoever, even those that would be required to fight seem to only be instilled to do exactly what they need to do and nothing else (tuning a radio for instance - I think they are shown tuning one in at one point but they don't seem to be able to use that ability to keep out transmissions they do not want).  

If someone is helping the Zents they could implement scambled transmission systems.  That would take care of any kind of outside transmission.

That's doing them quite a disservice.

The Zentradi are exactly what the ancient Protoculture created them to be: highly trained, highly motivated, professional soldiers who are well-trained and well-drilled in everything they needed to be trained in to do their jobs.  They're not stupid or ignorant by any means.  They're just the very model of "end user" when it comes to the advanced technology the Protoculture created for them.  They have the training and experience to operate their technology to its full potential.  They're just missing the necessary education about how that technology does what it does that would let them troubleshoot and repair it themselves.

The Zentradi forces absolutely know how to switch frequencies and encrypt their communications the same as humans.  The inventors of the Minmay Attack in the Vrlitwhai fleet and aboard the Macross weren't idiots either and accounted for that.  With the Vrlitwhai branch fleet's help, the first Minmay Attack was broadcast on all Zentradi frequencies and using the Boddole Zer main fleet's own ciphers.  The point was to make exposure to the culture shock material inescapable and prevent Zentradi ships and mecha from taking up an effective defensive posture by jamming their communications.  They could change frequencies, but if it's on all the standard frequencies then there's no way to communicate the new frequency bands and ciphers.  It becomes an exercise in "pick and pray", hoping someone else picked the same random non-standard channel you did (and odds are the Vrlitwhai branch fleet had the short list of agreed-upon backup channels too) all while being blasted with incomprehensible sounds and images non-stop.

[sketchley]

4 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

The Zentradi forces absolutely know how to switch frequencies and encrypt their communications the same as humans.  (...)

The PS1/Sega Saturn Game Super Dimensional Fortress Macross: Do You Remember Love? took it a step further: they introduced a "Jamming Station" ECM drone that was used to actively block transmissions from the Earth's side in and around the Bodoru Mobile Fortress.  One of the game's final levels was to defeat it so as to allow the Earth side's transmissions through, and the resulting chaos enabling them to make their final attack inside the fortress.

It's a shame that that game's reimagining of the TV series wasn't fully incorporated into later Macross productions, as I really liked the Quadoran-Nona and Zentrādi APC that appeared in that game.

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, sketchley said:

The PS1/Sega Saturn Game Super Dimensional Fortress Macross: Do You Remember Love? took it a step further: they introduced a "Jamming Station" ECM drone that was used to actively block transmissions from the Earth's side in and around the Bodoru Mobile Fortress.  One of the game's final levels was to defeat it so as to allow the Earth side's transmissions through, and the resulting chaos enabling them to make their final attack inside the fortress.

Macross: Eternal Love Song for the PC Engine took the same step a few years earlier in the Macross II timeline.

The UN Forces tried the Minmay Attack on the Burado main fleet only for it to prove ineffective because Quamzin had outfitted the ships of the Burado main fleet with an ancient Protoculture communications system that prevented the Minmay Attack from cutting into their communications.  The Prometheus II taskforce launches a raid on Quamzin's own flagship and fight the penultimate boss fight against Quamzin himself in order to steal Quamzin's piece of the system so they can break into the Burado fleet's communications with the Minmay Attack in preparation for the assault on the Burado mobile fortress.