Thoughts from the rewrite: Macross II

[Seto Kaiba]

Hi gents,

This weekend, some friends and I are starting the process of updating our heavily rewritten edition of the Palladium Books Macross II RPG to balance it with our Macross main timeline homebrew. This is something we've been putting off for a while, and since the rules on the boards prohibit us from sharing a completed version of the work with you all, I thought you might find the corrections we're making to that old game's fluff interesting and informative.

We're certainly open to questions... but we won't get into the actual crunch.

The information used in compiling this list of corrections to the fluff of the Macross II RPG is sourced exclusively from official Japanese publications including the OVA's official art books, promotional coverage from hobby magazines, interviews with the creators, and coverage of the OVA in the official Macross encyclopedia Macross Chronicle.

[Seto Kaiba]

Corrections in Macross II: the Role-Playing Game
Core Rulebook - Published 1993


The Setting of Macross II (Pages 104-110)
Page 104
"The year, 2089"

The correct date for the events of Macross II is 2091-2092, eighty years after the conclusion of the first Space War. This is actually a self-indulgent Gundam in-joke on the part of the OVA's staff, who had previously worked on Char's Counterattack and Zeta Gundam, corresponding to years 0079 and 0080 on the "New Era" calendar established in Macross: Flashback 2012.



Eighty years earlier the Earth defeated an attempted invasion by giant aliens known as the Zentran and Meltran.

Actually, it was only the Zentradi who attacked Earth... chasing a fleeing Meltrandi gun destroyer which crashed on South Ataria island. The Meltrandi fleet wasn't involved until the war had already technically ended with the cease-fire agreement on 11 September 2010. The Meltrandi Laplamiz main fleet was not involved in the devastation of Earth at all.



Much of the planet was devastated in that war, but in the end, the Zentran, who were bred only for war, came to appreciate Earth's culture and embraced the concepts of freedom, love, peace, and unity.

Almost the entire planet was devastated by the Zentradi 465th Main Fleet, but both the surviving forces from the Zentradi and Meltrandi fleets embraced Earth's culture after the destruction of the Boddole Zer mobile fortress.



Those Zentran exposed to such ideology began to question their existence and sided with the humans they were sent to destroy.

In actual fact, the Zentradi Army 465th Boddole Zer Main Fleet signed a cease-fire with the remaining UN Spacy forces on 11 September 2010, effectively siding with the humans against the Meltrandi before they ever suffered any significant impact from Earth's culture. The fleet's commander wanted to use the Earth culture and its thermonuclear reaction weaponry against the Meltrandi. They sided against Boddole Zer in the aftermath of the Laplamiz mobile fortress's destruction in the name of reclaiming their own culture.




It seemed that every ten years or so, other-worldly Zentran battle fleets or advanced scouts would enter Earth's solar system and inevitably head toward Earth to extract vengeance or cause trouble. The last of these skirmishes was 20 long years ago, with a minor incident involving Zentradi rogues only 10 years ago.

Initially, it was actually a great deal more frequent than that... with surviving fleet assets of Zentradi and Meltrandi origin continuing hostilities against each other and Earth. It petered out to about one significant fleet engagement every ten years decades later, in the 2040s. Prior to Macross II's events, Earth's defenses had weathered four more large-scale conflicts with the Zentradi and/or Meltrandi, and the most recent was only 10 years prior, in 2082. (The last major conflict being ten years ago is a reference to the original series in 1982.)



The people of Earth and even the military of the united Earth governments, the U.N. Spacy, began to believe they had seen the last of the alien invaders.

With Exsedol confirming that at least 2,000 other main fleet-sized formations roaming the galaxy intent on annihilating one side or the other, it's extremely unlikely that the Unification (UN) Government or its space forces (UN Spacy) would believe they'd seen the last of the Zentradi. Especially since they'd successfully survived encounters with no fewer than six such main fleets already.



Time and time again, the forces of the U.N. Spacy easily rebuffed each new offensive launched by the enemy.

Not even close... every time they encountered a main fleet-scale force, the UN Spacy barely managed to repel the invaders. The 2054 Zentradi war dragged on for eight months and cost the UN Forces dearly to repel the offensive. The only one that was really easy was the 2082 invasion, which was a conflict with a branch fleet of only about 1,000 ships, going up against the UN Spacy's newest weapons.



To the young Zentran and Meltran, their forefather's slave masters, the Marduk, were little more than faceless monsters in stories almost a hundred years old.

First, the name of the alien race is spelled Mardook (it's spelled differently from "Marduk" in Japanese and English). Second, the Mardook were never the slave masters of the Zentradi or Meltrandi. The Zentradi and Meltrandi were created by the Protoculture using the Protoculture's own genetics. The Mardook are hinted at being a faction of the Protoculture who fled their civilization's collapse, but they only control a tiny fraction of the total Zentradi or Meltrandi forces.

Neither the UN Forces nor the Zentradi who'd joined same even knew the Mardook existed.



This fleet is large, not like those of the last 80 years. More ships arrive every few hours, amassing into what will become an alien armada numbering in the thousands.

The Mardook fleet was, in fact, actually pretty darn tiny... it ONLY numbered in the tens of thousands of ships, as opposed to the average Zentradi main fleet's MILLIONS of ships. Vrlitwhai's (Britai's) initial fleet was over 1,000 ships strong.



The Marduk & Their Zentran

The Marduk (pronounced Mar-Duke) are a race of human looking beings who seek to achieve "peace through absolute power."

The Mardook (correct spelling), are a race of human-like beings who seek to preserve their own, sacred culture by annihilating anything that might "defile" it. They're not interested in galactic domination or a campaign of slavery. Their Zentradi are literally regarded only as disposable non-sentient tools.



Interesting because "Marduk" is the name of an ancient Babylonian god of war! Could there be a historical connection?

No, there isn't. There are some slight symbolic connotations there, but the creators are quite definite on there being no connection between the Mardook and Earth.



Viewers of the film are left with the impression that Emperor Ingues is more than mortal and has lived for hundreds, even thousands of years.

In all likelihood, Ingues is far older than that. He's the living main computer of the Ingues mobile fortress, an integral part of a massive battleship that has been continually operating for spans of time that defy a human mind's imagination. Even Boddole Zer, the living computer commanding the Zentradi Army's 465th Main Fleet was over 120,000 years old when it was destroyed in 2010... and several other mobile fortress ships are even older than that.



The Zentran and Meltran soldiers under the Marduk's rule are giant 40 to 45 foot (12.2 to 13.7m) tall warriors bred exclusively for war.

Actually, the Zentradi and Meltrandi are five times the height of a human... 8 to 10 meters tall. Only the purpose-bred commanders are bigger.



To this end, the Zentran and Meltran warriors are continually brainwashed and kept in suspended animation until they are needed for combat.

Half-right... there's no suspended animation in evidence, just brainwashing.



The Zentran & Meltran of Earth

The Zentran/Meltran were genetically designed, bred, cloned, and psychologically conditioned for war. They were aggressive, short-tempered, and unskilled (except in combat).

This is a Robotech-ism that really does a disservice to the Zentradi and Meltrandi on a lot of levels. They were genetically designed to be effective soldiers, and trained as soldiers, and to a certain extent their aggression was a biological factor rather than a conditioned one, but many of them were extremely bright, patient, and insightful souls who valued camaraderie and possessed what we today would classify as extremely sophisticated mathematical and technical skill.



Their Marduk masters had even segregated the two sexes to such a degree that each considered the other to be an entirely different race, hence their separate names.

This is actually wrong on a few levels. The Mardook were, as previously noted, not the ones responsible for the development or usage of the Zentradi or Meltrandi. The Zentradi and Meltrandi were separate for two reasons... they were created after the Protoculture's science advanced to the point that they used cloning for reproduction more than biological means, essentially dividing their society along gender lines... and each side of that divide created giant soldiers in its own image when things finally ended in hostilities.

The second reason is more basic... "Zentran" is the Protoculture word for "Man" or "Male,", and "Meltran" means "Woman" or "Female". Their society divided itself along gender lines once biological reproduction went by the wayside. They see each other as different races because the society that created them was divided between men and women.



The males and females never associated with one another and their feelings of sexuality were suppressed by separation, mind control, drugs, and rigid military laws.

Actually, only that first and last one are correct... the Zentradi and Meltrandi were rival powers vying to destroy each other, so any tender feelings were suppressed by the fact that the other side was literally the enemy and out to kill them, and fraternizing with the enemy is a shooting offense.

In the original Macross TV series and its continuity, the male and female soldiers were separated by standing orders and because they were designed for different military functions.



Friendship, fraternization, and sentimentality were scorned as weaknesses.

Actually, camaraderie was highly valued among the Zentradi and Meltrandi... Quamzin actually referred to the men of his aerial armored division as the "Quamzin Clan", and was known to engage in social drinking and gambling with his men.



Most Zentran and Meltran have been completely integrated into human society. From a strictly medical/biological point of view, they are human beings.

Close enough... though this doesn't really capture the extent to which they integrated. When Mash met Ishtar for the first time, he was intrigued because he'd never seen a pure-blood Meltran before. There's quite a lot of interbreeding going on there.



The only possible distinction is their heritage and subsequent hatred of their ancestor's slave masters the Marduk.

Well, as the Mardook weren't the Zentradi or Meltrandi's slave masters, this obviously isn't the case... the UN Forces as a whole didn't even know the Mardook existed.

[Alpha 11]

Would love to have all the detail info. Any chance you could e-mail it to me?

[Seto Kaiba]

Now that the corrections to the basic setting part are up, I'm going to start from the beginning of the M2 core book.


Human's Sentiments toward the Marduk and Zentran (Page 17)
[...]

I'm not going to quote the whole chart, or even a portion of it... but this is one of the more glaring bits of absolute nonsense in the book.

By 2092, absolutely every human being living on Earth has been around Zentradi and Meltrandi their entire lives. At the end of the first space war, there were eight times as many Zentradi and Meltrandi as normal humans on Earth, and while humanity used cloning to boost its own numbers and engaged in a whole lotta old-fashioned reproduction to bounce back from the brink, virtually every person on Earth has grown up in an environment where humans and Zentradi/Meltrandi have been living together in peace for 80 years and it's almost impossible to tell one from the other at a glance. This table seems to suggest that 60% of the population (or more?!) is bigoted against Zentradi, in complete defiance of the near-complete acceptance of the Zentradi and Meltrandi that prevailed as early as the 2030s!



Who Can Pilot a Robot Vehicle (Page 36)
The operation of a giant robot war machine or power armor requires special training. [...]

Broadly true, but it's worth noting that mecha are commercially available in the Macross II setting... and getting a Valkyrie pilot's license is something within the grasp of even a teenager.



Disadvantages of the Volley
The enter volley or burst must be directed at one target.

This is entirely at odds with almost every combat scene in the entirety of Macross, as well as the letter of the tech specs, which indicate that even the oldest and most low-spec VFs can track and fire upon a dozen or more targets SIMULTANEOUSLY.



Missiles (Page 38-39)
[...]

Again, because this is a VERY large chart, I'm not going to bother copying it all out. In Macross as a whole, ALL missiles use hybrid guidance technology that enables the behaviors listed for the "Smart Bombs" rule. This is the foundation of the animation technique that Macross popularized: the Itano Circus.

As far as missile types go, the classification used here is completely off. There are four broad classes of missile:

• Micro-missiles - Short-ranged, high-agility, high-velocity missiles, usually either the same or a slightly smaller warhead than the medium-range missile class.
• Medium-Range Missiles - Exactly what it says on the tin, sometimes the same warhead as the micro-missiles, but with a more powerful motor. Not really used in Macross II at all.
• Long-range missiles - Even larger than the Medium-Range Missiles, and often packing much heavier warheads in the bargain... sometimes even lower-yield versions of the heaviest anti-warship ordinance.
• Anti-warship missiles - The big honkin' thermonuclear reaction ordinance used for smashing capital ships.

The warhead ranges are massively short-sold (by a factor of ten or more), but the other really glaring problem is the addition of a bunch of unnecessary missile types. There are only really two types that commonly see service... the anti-armor explosive type, and thermonuclear reaction warheads. All the others listed aren't used, or don't exist in the setting. Nuclear warheads are technology that went the way of the dinosaur over eighty years prior to the events of the OVA. Their in-series replacement is the thermonuclear reaction warhead technology is more potent than fusion and leaves no radioactive fallout byproducts.



The U.N. Spacy Valkyrie Series of Transformable Fighters (Page 47)
All military Valkyries have three configurations: jet, gerwalk, and soldier.

Not quite. The three modes of a Variable Fighter, commonly called a Valkyrie, are Fighter, GERWALK, and Battroid. Not all military-use Valkyries have three modes, even in the Macross II OVA. The VA-1SS Metal Siren has FOUR modes, and the VF-XX Zentradi Valkyrie had only two. That's fully half the number of military VFs in the OVA.



In the jet configuration, the fighter looks like an ordinary combat jet and possesses all of the speed and maneuverability of a jet.

In reality, they possess a great deal more speed and agility than a jet, as well as substantially greater operational endurance and an unlimited service ceiling.



Although it can perform jet propelled leaps (jets in the bottom of its feet) and has many directional jets for movement in space and underwater, the Valkyrie cannot fly while in the soldier form.

This is patently untrue even for VFs in service eighty years before the Macross II OVA. The VFs of Macross II have more than double the engine power of the VF-1, and only fractionally greater mass, and are perfectly capable of flight in battroid... AS SEEN IN THE OVA.



All Valkyries for military use are nuclear powered, with a 12 year life under the most strenuous combat conditions. The civilian style vehicles have six to eight year power supply depending on how much they are used.

Palladium's writers seem to have erroneously assumed that these mecha are powered by nuclear fission... rather than the fusion-like thermonuclear reaction overtechnology. They uniformly carry enough fuel that they could easily fly around the world supersonically (or even hypersonically) dozens or hundreds of times annd operate continuously in the field for days. An added benefit is that the fuel's mass is negligible, the full fuel load for a VF-1 being only about 264lb.



Range is 200 miles (321km).

The radar range stated is less than that of the VF-1's initial radar... it's rather unlikely that the Valkyrie II, being seventy years more advanced, would have a worse radar system.



Valkyrie VF-2JA Atmosphere Fighter (Page 49)
[...]

The correct name of this mecha is the VF-2JA Icarus.



ART REFERENCE MATERIAL: PAGE 49 UPPER HALF

The art used on this page for the cockpit belongs to the VF-2SS Valkyrie II.



In days past, the VF-2JA has been used against Zentran rebels, terrorists, powerful criminals, and in other types of military conflicts. The VF-2JA is fast and more heavily armored than some earlier Valkyries and has been in use by the U.N. Spacy for over 50 years.

There's barely a true word in what I just quoted, sorry to say.

In truth, the VF-2JA is actually one of the newest additions to the UN Forces' arsenal... the Mardook war was the first time they were ever used in combat. The whole VF-2 platform was barely twenty years old when the Mardook war ended in 2092, and the VF-2JA Icarus is the newest member of that family. They were adopted by the UN Forces in 2086, a mere five years before the Mardook War. It IS faster and has far heavier armor than older VFs though.



The reason that it is not considered a "space" fighter is because it lacks transatmospheric capabilities.

Actually, the reason it's not considered a space fighter is that it was designed for use as an atmospheric patrol craft, so its vernier complement was cut down, the cockpit's space-use life support hardware was scaled back, and its fuel tanks were reduced in size so the armor could be increased because they don't need large amounts of fuel in atmospheric flight.



Although the VF-2JA can attain a speed of Mach four, it still does not have enough speed/thrust to escape Earth's gravity.

The VF-2JA's mass is only marginally greater than a VF-1's, and it has twice the engine power... it can easily reach space under its own power, though that usually isn't done because there's not a lot of call for it and it takes a lot of fuel (by VF standards). The VF-2JA's listed top speed is in excess of Mach 5.5.



Class: Valkyrie I: Atmosphere Fighter (transformable)

This is essentially nonsense... the Valkyrie I is the VF-1 Valkyrie. The VF-2JA is not a VF-1.



Destroying the head will destroy the two top mounted lasers and destroy all forms of optical enhancements. The range and targeting capabilities and all other sensors (non-optical) are reduced by half.

This is also nonsense. The camera systems are (principally) located in the head, but the head's radar is an indepenent system with far shorter range than the main radar in the nosecone, and many other sensors are not located in or even near the head. I'll get into the armament later.



Flying in Jet Configuration: Mach 4 [...]

The VF-2JA's listed top speed in official is in excess of Mach 5.5.



Height: 13m in humanoid configuration.

The VF-2JA's listed height in battroid mode is 15.9 meters (52.16 feet).



Weight: 23 tons; [...]

Official reference material describes the VF-2JA as being less than twenty tonnes fully loaded... empty it weighs only a few hundred kilograms more than a VF-1 Valkyrie.



Power System: Nuclear, with a 12 year life.

Like all Valkyries, and really all Overtechnology-based mecha, the VF-2JA's powered by its thermonuclear reaction engines, carrying enough fuel for days.



Weapon Systems
Twin Lasers (2)

Laser weapons had been all but abandoned by the UN Forces by the time the VF-2 series was introduced in 2072. The VF-2JA's coaxial weapons are particle beam cannons, with ranges something like five times what's listed in the RPG.

BC-60 Energy Beam Cannon

This is actually a heavy railgun, more or less identical to the one on the Nex Custom VF-2SS.

Optional 2-SS Heavy Gun Pod

The VF-2SS's medium railgun cannot be carried by the VF-2JA.

[Seto Kaiba]

Valkyrie II VF-2SS Standard Space Fighter (Page 53)
Valkyrie II VF-2SS

The correct name for this mecha is the VF-2SS Valkyrie II... its TYPE is not Valkyrie II, its NAME is.



The VF-2SS is commonly referred to as the "Space Fighter" or "Space Valkyrie". The basic VF-2SS Valkyrie constitutes the bulk (94%) of all the human piloted space fighters used by the U.N. Spacy in orbit/space.

I've never seen it called that anywhere but here... it's only referred to as "Valkyrie II", because that's its name.

Also, the "basic" VF-2SS Valkyrie II comprises exactly ZERO PERCENT of all human-piloted space fighters used by the UN Spacy. This fighter is not used without its Super Armed Pack, so this entire entry in the book is actually nonsense! The only times a VF-2SS is ever seen without its Super Armed Pack is in the Moon Festival's airshow and the OVA's mid-episode eyecatch!



The new, VF-MS Metal Siren has only recently been introduced as a more powerful Valkyrie design and represents only 6% of the current force.

As of 2092, the VA-1SS Metal Siren has not been introduced AT ALL... the only units that existed are a non-transformable airframe demonstrator and a prototype that Cpt. Nex Gilbert sortied in during the final battle of the war. No others are known to exist.



Of the VF-2SS Valkyries, 50% are standard space fighters, 35% are the heavy weapons VF-2SS SAP fighters and 15% are VF-2SS SAP Special fighters (typically reserved for officers, aces, and special assignments).

In actual fact, the VF-2SS Valkyrie II is never deployed in combat without its Super Armed Pack. Also, it would be worth noting that what the RPG calls the "SAP Special" is not a different craft from the VF-2SS w/ Super Armed Pack, and is in, in truth, just substituting one leg-mounted missile pack for a unique pack containing a heavier gun pod that was made specially for Cpt. Nex Gilbert and is not mass-produced.



The VF-2SS has served the U.N. Spacy for nearly 23 years and has proven to be extremely tough and reliable under the most adverse conditions.

At the time of the Mardook invasion in 2091-2092, the VF-2SS Valkyrie II is only ten years old. It was a new fighter introduced in 2081, and the Mardook conflict is only the second time is has been used in war.



One of its unique features is that it can be dramatically augmented with additional weapons and armor attachments known as the Super Armored Pack (SAP).

The actual name for the pack is the Super Armed Pack, because it is principally armaments, not armor.



However, it is not as aerodynamic as the VF-2JA and can only attain a top speed of Mach 2.5 when flying in Earth's atmosphere. Like the VF-2JA, once trapped inside Earth's gravity, it can not return to space under its own power and must hitch a ride in or on a larger spacecraft [...]

More from the department of "Didn't look at the art", I'm afraid... the VF-2SS Valkyrie II is actually just a space optimization of an all-regime airframe and is every bit as capable of flight in atmosphere as its new cousin, the VF-2JA. Its top speed is well in excess of Mach 5.5 and it is perfectly capable of flight to an orbital altitude under its own power... it has three times the engine power of a VF-1S, and weighs only a mere 600kg more than the VF-1 with a typical combat load.



ART REFERENCE MATERIAL: PAGE 55 UPPER HALF

The cockpit art shown on page 55 is not the VF-2SS... it's the forward half of the VC-079 Civilian Valkyrie cockpit.



Height: 45 feet (14m) in humanoid configuration

The actual height to the top of the beam cannons is 14.5m, but to just the top of the head, this is actually correct.



Length: 15.8m in jet configuration.

Actually 13.5m long in fighter mode... the Super Armed Pack rounds it out to a nice, even 14m with that heavy railgun.



Weight: 29 tons

The listed weight for a fully loaded VF-2SS Valkyrie II is 19,100kg (19.1 tonnes). Without its war load, it only weighs a few hundred kilograms more than a VF-1 Valkyrie.



Twin Lasers (2)

Same as the VF-2JA... these are particle beam cannons, not lasers, with a range five times what's listed.



Optional BC-60 Energy Beam Cannon
The VF-2SS cannot use the VF-2JA's heavy railgun, which is not a beam cannon.

[Seto Kaiba]

Valkyrie II VF-2SS with SAP Augmentation System
The incredible Super Armor Pack virtually transforms the standard VF-2SS into a super-powered, armored assault unit bristling with missiles, rail guns, super beam cannon and additional body armor! The SAP augmentation system weighs 20 tons, two-thirds of the weight of the Space Valkyrie itself [...]

While it's true the Super Armed Pack contains virtually all of the VF-2SS's weapons, it contains no additional beam weaponry (the cannon is a heavy anti-capital ship railgun) and the mass is nowhere near what's stated there. A fully loaded VF-2SS is only 19,100kg.



Length: 52 feet (15.8m) in jet configuration.

's actually 14 meters on the nose if you count the barrel of the big railgun.



Weight: The VF-2SS is 29 tons. The SAP adds another 20 tons for a total of 49.

In actual fact, the weight of the VF-2SS is only about 14 tonnes, and the Super Armed Pack and all the weaponry and fuel it and the airframe contains is only 19.1 tonnes in total.



Power System [...] Twin Lasers [...]

Refer to my previous remarks.



Heavy, Long-Range Missile Shields (3)

The large missile launcher pods cannot rotate.



Forearm Mini-missile launchers [...] Lower Leg mini-missile launchers [...]

The missile counts here are wrong. You can see in the art on throughout this section that the arm pack has FIVE launcher assembles and fifteen missiles, while each leg has four launchers for a total of twelve missiles. The total count is 54, not 66. There is evidence to suggest ALL of the Valkyrie II's missiles use thermonuclear reaction warheads... yes, even the micro-missiles.



2-SS Heavy Gun Pod

This weapon is referred to as a "Medium Railgun" in official material... and fires a very large caliber round, not a million little peas like this entry seems to think. It has stopping power easily matching the GU-11's, and almost certainly exceeding it by a large margin.



Valkyrie II VF-2SS SAP Special Space Fighter

Doesn't exist.

Succinct, isn't it? The special leg pack that contains the heavy railgun is a one-off part created specially for Cpt. Nex Gilbert of the UN Spacy, and is unique to his VF-2SS. Otherwise, there is absolutely nothing different from a stock VF-2SS Valkyrie II w/ Super Armed Pack. This whole entry, all 3+ pages of it, is a waste of paper. The gun pod is basically just the VF-2JA's heavy railgun in a different container.



Automated Attack Bits (AAB) [...]

The Squire bits are only used with the Super Armed Pack-equipped Valkyrie, because they depend upon the communications pod in the Super Armed Pack to synchronize with the Valkyrie II's avionics package and fire control system. They were actually designed as a firepower enhancement system for general combat, not for anti-ship or anti-missile duty. The maximum number of Squires a VF-2SS can support is FIVE, not four, as seen in the animation.



VC-079 Civilian Valkyrie (Page 65)
The transformable Valkyries have proven to be so reliable and renowed, that the U.N. Spacy has authorized the production of a civilian model. The VC-079 is made available main to civil defense, news, communications, and space agencies and mega-corporations.

The UN Spacy didn't authorize anything... and the VC-079 is NOT the first civilian-issue Valkyrie. The idea of a civilian-market VF was tabled by the Takachihof corporation in the 2050s, and proved to be a runaway success with both government agencies and as a leisure craft. The VC-079 is the Takachihof corporation's second offering in the civilian VF market.



It is also designed for use specifically in the atmosphere of Earth and has two seats, one for the pilot and one for a passenger.

The VC-079 was designed as an all-regime craft and is perfectly capable of operating for long periods in space as well as in atmosphere. Its range in space can be extended significantly with an assist booster.



Although the civilian Valkyrie is not designed for combat, in an emergency the robot vehicle can use the hand-held beam cannon or any of the rail guns used by the military fighters.

With what hands? The VC-079 has no arms and cannot be armed with anything because it has no fire control system.

[keir451]

Waht would your ratings on weapon damages be? MDC ratings? Speed ratings?

[Seto Kaiba]

Would love to have all the detail info. Any chance you could e-mail it to me?

It'll be a few weeks before we're done with the complete update of the book.

Waht would your ratings on weapon damages be? MDC ratings? Speed ratings?

One of the things we're trying to do ties into something I've discussed here before... a problem with the Palladium writers making no apparent effort to scale assigned Mega-Damage values for weapons to their actual destructive potential. If there's a setting where Mega-Damage vs. Structural Damage is actually outright justified, it's Macross, where there's a sharp divide between the damage resistance of our modern weapons and overtechnology-derived ones.

It's crossing the line into absurdity to suggest that a 55mm rotary cannon that fires armor-piercing shells with a muzzle energy of over 2,600 kilojoules does no more than 2.5 times the damage of a railgun which only fires with a muzzle energy of 70 kilojoules. If the laws of physics had anything to say about it, that rotary cannon ought to be doing around 38 times as much damage... especially in a setting like RT which exists somewhere between tech stasis and tech decay.

Obviously, for reasons of Palladium's own rules, I cannot get into the specifics here because they no longer have the Macross II license.

[keir451]

Would love to have all the detail info. Any chance you could e-mail it to me?

It'll be a few weeks before we're done with the complete update of the book.

What would your ratings on weapon damages be? MDC ratings? Speed ratings?

One of the things we're trying to do ties into something I've discussed here before... a problem with the Palladium writers making no apparent effort to scale assigned Mega-Damage values for weapons to their actual destructive potential. If there's a setting where Mega-Damage vs. Structural Damage is actually outright justified, it's Macross, where there's a sharp divide between the damage resistance of our modern weapons and overtechnology-derived ones.

It's crossing the line into absurdity to suggest that a 55mm rotary cannon that fires armor-piercing shells with a muzzle energy of over 2,600 kilojoules does no more than 2.5 times the damage of a railgun which only fires with a muzzle energy of 70 kilojoules. If the laws of physics had anything to say about it, that rotary cannon ought to be doing around 38 times as much damage... especially in a setting like RT which exists somewhere between tech stasis and tech decay.

Obviously, for reasons of Palladium's own rules, I cannot get into the specifics here because they no longer have the Macross II license.

Well part of the issue is even with better chemistry there's only so much that a chemically propelled round will do. The real difference isn't even in the kilojoules, but in the mass of the round combined w/it's velocity. Even with better chemical propellants and mettalurgy, a 38 mm round is STILL only a 38mm round, its damage capacity is relatively finite as the only thing you can really do is increase it's velocity. So a larger round moving at the equivalent speed of a 38 or 55mm round will do more damage. A railgun firing a single large bore round is more practical than one that fires a bunch of smaller rounds and energy weapons are even more practical than railgun rounds as they travel at light speeds and as long as you have energy you can keep recharging your capacitors, where as solid shell ammo has a finite capacity, once you run out that's it.
Also part of it is the idea of "game balance" Kevin doesn't want the PCs running around with weaponry that can destroy a batttle ship monted on a fighter (no matter how realistic that may be) . He's looking at "playability" so he scales the damge down to make it (In His Opinion) more reasonable and challenging.
Could you post the damages on the pro boards site instead?

[Seto Kaiba]

A brief note on currency...

Macross has generally avoided the subject of money in the future... it's still a capitalist society, but they've generally tried to avoid actually identifying the currency until recently. Oddly enough, there was no actual money shown in use until Macross 7 Trash, and the currency wasn't identified until very recently in Macross Frontier: Itsuwari no Utahime, where Sheryl paid SMS 120 million credits to use the Macross Quarter on a rescue operation. While America WAS one of the founding nations of the Earth Unification Government, the currency is not American dollars.



The Marduk & Their Troops (Page 77)
The Marduk [...]

Broken record, I know, but it's spelled Mardook. The official art books helpfully spell it that way (and in English no less!), because the name of the god Marduk is spelled マルドゥク (Maruduku) and the name of the aliens in Macross II is spelled マルドゥーク (Maruduuku). They sound almost the same, but they ARE different.



One-man fighters used by the Marduk

The numbers given here are completely incorrect... the typical battlepod formation is the battalion, which contains 25 regular pods and 3 officer pods. Apart from the two types of pods, the other types of mecha are not placed in mixed units. Pods for the rank and file, battle suits for the elite.

As a side note, there is no "Power Armor" in the Zentradi forces... what the Nousjadeul-Ger and the other mecha like it are called is "Battle Suits". The pilot is not controlling the limbs directly, and in most cases his limbs are not inside the mecha's limbs.



Battle Pod (Page 78)
The Zentran battle pod uses an experimental antigravity propulsion system. Normally a spacecraft must reach an escape velocity of Mach 5.2 or greater to break the old of Earth's gravity. [...]

Considering this pod is used by the overwhelming majority of the Mardook's Zentradi forces, and likely has been for hundreds of thousands of years, there's nothing experimental about the gravity control system it uses.



The officer's battle pod is piloted by a giant Zentran warrior who sits in the belly of this devastating war machine. It is armed with high-powered lasers and an array of missiles. The officer's pod has two legs but walking and maneuverability are limited.

Those weapons are electron particle beam cannons, same as the cannons on the regular battle pod. It possesses no proper legs, only some flexible thruster appendages, and cannot walk.



Short Range Missile Launcher Drum (1; rear)

Doesn't exist.



Unlike the previous vehicles, this environmental armor is worn by the giant Zentran warrior like a suit of armor. The power armor is of Marduk design and augments the giant's already formidable strength.

As noted above, this is NOT a suit of powered armor. This is a battle suit, and the pilot is essentially standing upright in a harness-type cockpit not dissimilar from the Metal Siren's battroid mode, controlling the limbs indirectly. It does not augment the pilot's strength in any way, shape, or form, and the limbs are purely actuator-driven. This is a Mardook-designed variant of the Nousjadeul platform, the Zentradi Army's favored battle suit design for half a million years, and is more technologically advanced than its source design.



It is armed with a chest canon and an overhead particle beam cannon.

Er... no. Its armaments are a chest-mounted impact cannon, which is a beam weapon powered directly from the suit's thermonuclear converter, and a large-bore plasma cannon. It does not use the laser rifle that Zentradi infantry carry, but can take a close combat polearm or a variety of small, handheld energy weapons including a laser machine pistol or electron beam gun.



Meltran Power Armor

Second verse, same as the first.
A little bit louder, and a whole lot worse.

There are no powered armor suits in this... that there is a battle suit.



Most females are either fighting aces or officers. They are considered more aggressive, cunning, and dangerous than the male Zentran.

As the Meltrandi are a standing army of their own, the rival power to the Zentradi, the first sentence is pure nonsense and the Mardook don't afford their cloned soldiery with much in the way of rank or title or authority when the whole point of brainwashing them is that they WON'T think for themselves. It helps somewhat that the Meltrandi were designed with an emphasis on piloting skill rather than brute strength and raw aggression... but they are no more aggressive, cunning, or dangerous than the males.



The environmental suit is worn by the giant females like a suit of armor.

No, it isn't. The suit is considerably larger than the pilot inside it, whose body is almost entirely inside of the chest cavity.



Gilgamesh Type I, Marduk Officer Power Armor
[...]

Did they even watch the show? The Mardook are human-sized, the males averaging about 1.8m tall or so... that's a 14m+ tall mecha. Its actual classification is "Mobile Battle Suit" (yes, it's a mobile suit... those Gundam references I alluded to before just got a LOT less subtle).

Also, the Japanese name for this mecha is "Gigamesh", not "Gilgamesh".



The Marduk are human size and may in fact be human. For every 1000 Zentran or Meltran there is one Marduk officer.

The Mardook are strongly implied to be the descendants of a surviving group of the ancient Protoculture, hellbent on preserving their culture and existence... so they're not human. Humanity's genome is in fact VERY close to theirs literally by design (the Protoculture genetically modified Earth's early homonids).

Also, the Gigamesh is not reserved for Mardook officers... the rank and file pilots of the Mardook use them and Feff's was a custom unit. (Red paint job? A horn? Custom? Getting awfully Char in here, isn't it?)



Types one and two are very similar in design and power. The main differences are mostly stylistic to differentiate between officers and commanders.

Actually, Feff's custom Gigamesh has a retractable armored cover to protect the sensors in combat, a second sensor spine, an enlarged frame, improved engines, larger wing cutters, and more extendable battle claws... and is overall a higher-performance machine than the grunt version.



Forearm Mini-Missile Launchers:

The animation model sheets from the OVA's production indicate that each arm holds a total of 50 missiles, for a total of 100. The Gigamesh is not known to make use of any gun-type weapons.



The command armor is the type most often seen and used by Feff in the animated series. It is slightly more heavily armored [...]

Refer to my previous remarks about the many differences between Feff's custom Gigamesh and the one issued to regular Mardook soldiery. It is the ONLY mecha Feff uses, and his is the only one, because it's his private custom mecha.



The U.N. Spacy Valkyrie Fighter Pilot O.C.C. (Page 93)
If the U.N. Spacy has a problem, it's that the military leaders have become too reliant upon the transformable fighter craft and their courageous pilots.

Er... no. In the series, Sylvie makes it pretty clear that the concern is the military growing complacent because they're overdependent on the effectiveness of the Minmay Attack. She's right to have been concerned too... because the Minmay Attack NOT working had happened before, about fifty years prior.



Lieutenant Silvie Gena, a Valkyrie ace, has recognized this problem and has had many discussions with her superiors about improving and diversifying their mechanized troops.

For one, it's 1st Lieutenant Sylvie Geena, the UN Spacy uses an Army/Air Force rank system, and her rank therein is 1st Lieutenant.

For two, as I noted above, her discussions with Exegran in the series have nothing whatsoever to do with the military's hardware, and everything to do with its tactics.



The ponderous bureaucracy of the military has responded by slowly developing the powerful Metal Siren Valkyrie and making some advancements in their mechanized ground troops - improvements that were almost too late in their most recent conflict with the Marduk.

The Metal Siren had been in development for years before the OVA, and the destroids had been in service for at least a decade.



In the military's defense, until the Marduk invasion, the number of incidents involving the enemy had been few, insignificant and spread over the last 50 years.

Um... no. The UN Spacy had faced a major invasion as recently as ten years prior (Hibiki mentions that the coverage of same was what inspired him to become a journalist), and the UN Forces had become so overconfident in the Minmay Attack because the 2082 war was a one-sided curbstomp battle in the UN's favor. The 2054 war was NOT insignificant, considering it decimated the UN Spacy's fleets, including the loss of most of Britai's old forces, and resulted in the capture of a factory satellite that triggered a huge boom in overtechnology advancement.

[jaymz]

Waht would your ratings on weapon damages be? MDC ratings? Speed ratings?

My rewrites are based on extensive discussions with Seto using comparisons to mainline Macross mecha to get baselines and starting points. What I've got is probably as accurate as you will find using the palladium system more or less as we know it.

Not trying to toot my own horn, just pointing out what is likely the reality.

[Seto Kaiba]

Well part of the issue is even with better chemistry there's only so much that a chemically propelled round will do. The real difference isn't even in the kilojoules, but in the mass of the round combined w/it's velocity.

Er... kier, you do know that the muzzle energy of a firearm is the kinetic energy of the bullet expressed in joules as a function of 1/2 * the mass of the round * the square of the velocity (1/2mv^2)? This is basic physics, old chum.

It IS a measure of the mass of the round combined with its velocity... it's pretty much the accepted metric for comparing ballistic damage potential.

Also part of it is the idea of "game balance" Kevin doesn't want the PCs running around with weaponry that can destroy a batttle ship monted on a fighter (no matter how realistic that may be) .

That's nonsense... and that's why we're correcting it. Most SF settings are ones in which someone who brings a megawatt laser or beam cannon to battle officially has the biggest stick. Macross has the distinction of being a setting where practically every weapon is massively powerful, and many mecha are explicitly armed with anti-capital ship ordinance! Bring a megawatt laser to a fight there and your enemy might send you home with some money to buy a bigger gun.

It doesn't make any sense for a man-portable infantry weapon to be dealing almost as much damage as the kind of cannon that makes the A-10A's gun look like a kid's pellet gun by comparison. That's just a bout of immersion-breaking nonsense.

(Of course, another thing we've done is to eliminate the whole concept of what amounts to MD personal weaponry.)

[keir451]

Well part of the issue is even with better chemistry there's only so much that a chemically propelled round will do. The real difference isn't even in the kilojoules, but in the mass of the round combined w/it's velocity.

Er... kier, you do know that the muzzle energy of a firearm is the kinetic energy of the bullet expressed in joules as a function of 1/2 * the mass of the round * the square of the velocity (1/2mv^2)? This is basic physics, old chum.

It IS a measure of the mass of the round combined with its velocity... it's pretty much the accepted metric for comparing ballistic damage potential.

Also part of it is the idea of "game balance" Kevin doesn't want the PCs running around with weaponry that can destroy a batttle ship monted on a fighter (no matter how realistic that may be) .

That's nonsense... and that's why we're correcting it. Most SF settings are ones in which someone who brings a megawatt laser or beam cannon to battle officially has the biggest stick. Macross has the distinction of being a setting where practically every weapon is massively powerful, and many mecha are explicitly armed with anti-capital ship ordinance! Bring a megawatt laser to a fight there and your enemy might send you home with some money to buy a bigger gun.

It doesn't make any sense for a man-portable infantry weapon to be dealing almost as much damage as the kind of cannon that makes the A-10A's gun look like a kid's pellet gun by comparison. That's just a bout of immersion-breaking nonsense.

(Of course, another thing we've done is to eliminate the whole concept of what amounts to MD personal weaponry.)

Again this is where we run into differences. The people I associate with never speak in terms of kilojoules when speaking about weapons, more often they speak in terns of feet per second or miles per second and they actually speak about the mass of round seperately as well. So a discussion w/them typically sounds like "X round, weighing Y lbs/ tons, etc., moving at Z fps/mps/mph impacts with B force". Note: I'm not saying you're wrong, it's just that I have never heard the military personnel I've worked with/ associated with speak in terms of kilojoules in regards to muzzle velocity, so I, in turn, don't think in terms of kilojoules either. The only time I've ever used kilojoules or encountered it, personally, is in regards to electrical energy. (Also I've never taken a physics course in my life and though I can do that level of math in a pinch, it was never really my forte. Especially as the work I do on a daily basis doesn't require me to actually use that level of math, "Dammit , Jim., I'm a Dental Assistant, not a physicist!").
I agree that in most scifi if one has a megawatt laser or something else they're the biggest kid on the block. BUT ALL of our collective expereince w/ the Palladium system has shown us that KEVIN doesn't hink that way. When he writes that stuff for the game he's writing it for the players and throwing in HIS concepts of game balance. Of course it's ridiculous, but again it is HIS interpretation NOT ours.
I also wonder if "Gigamesh" and "Mardook" weren't errors on the part of the creators, they're just too close to "Marduk" and "Gilgamesh" for it to be a conicidence. So I can see why the translators for PB may have decided to rewrite them as they did. Plus it gives the setting a feeling that there's more of a conncetion than just the Protoculture race tinkering with our DNA, maybe some of them tinkered with our early societies as well?

[Seto Kaiba]

Again this is where we run into differences. The people I associate with never speak in terms of kilojoules when speaking about weapons, more often they speak in terns of feet per second or miles per second and they actually speak about the mass of round seperately as well.

Yeah, if they're American they probably use grains, feet per second, and foot-pounds force as their units, not kilograms, meters per second, and joules. Metric units make the process a lot easier, I've found, but it's the same math either way. I use metric because that's what the Japanese source material uses, and because I'm one of the few people on this project who isn't from a metric country.

So a discussion w/them typically sounds like "X round, weighing Y lbs/ tons, etc., moving at Z fps/mps/mph impacts with B force".

Oh, I believe you. Look at any Wikipedia entry for a bullet and you'll find three things... the weight of the round given in either grains or grams, the velocity in feet or meters per second, and the energy in either foot-pounds force or joules. The metric used for actually comparing damage potential is the energy, the figure in foot-pounds force or joules. The joules are simply the "B force" in your equation there.

I agree that in most scifi if one has a megawatt laser or something else they're the biggest kid on the block. BUT ALL of our collective expereince w/ the Palladium system has shown us that KEVIN doesn't hink that way.

And that, my friend, is why we're fixing it. I very firmly believe that a VF pilot has a right to smirk at the guys pointing an anti-infantry machine gun at him, and that he SHOULD go in search of a new space suit when he sees someone leveling an anti-warship railgun at him.

I also wonder if "Gigamesh" and "Mardook" weren't errors on the part of the creators, they're just too close to "Marduk" and "Gilgamesh" for it to be a conicidence.

As I've noted earlier, the creators of Macross II did this very deliberately... the names are homage, but not meant to be taken as direct reference. Hence the changes in spelling. Macross II's director, Ken'ichi Yatagai, commented on this in an interview for B-Club Magazine when the series came out.

So I can see why the translators for PB may have decided to rewrite them as they did. Plus it gives the setting a feeling that there's more of a conncetion than just the Protoculture race tinkering with our DNA, maybe some of them tinkered with our early societies as well?

Problem is, the Protoculture were on Earth tens of thousands of years before humanity even concocted the civilization that gave rise to the Mesopotamian pathenon... and DYRL explicitly establishes that they fled Earth when the conflict between the Zentradi and the Meltrandi started moving our way about 18 thousand years before the rise of Babylon and haven't been back since.

[jaymz]

*points to my wiki* I'd just use that and not worry about it

[keir451]

*points to my wiki* I'd just use that and not worry about it

Yeah that's pretty much what I'll do I was just thinking that if his numbers were different I'd like to see them.

[jaymz]

Well in Seto's case the system he is looking to do it in is very different from the palladium system as we generally know it.

[Seto Kaiba]

Macross II Sourcebook One

The Mecha of the U.N. Spacy (Page 5)
The mechanized ground forces of the U.N. Spacy operate giant, non-transformable mecha. These are heavily armored mechanized assault and defense weapons equipped with cannons, beam guns, and missiles. They are the front-line defense against alien and mechanized enemies. The mecha of the armored mechanized infantry are anti-fighter, robot, and spacecraft weapons with long-range capabilities and heavy fire-power; a single unit is more powerful than an entire 20th century tank division!

I'm not sure why they seem so reluctant to use the word "Destroid", because that's what those are.

Also, Macross II was one of the first occasions where we explicitly saw destroids being used by more branches of the service than just the Spacy. The UN Army is shown using them as anti-air defenses in the final episode... admittedly with limited success.

They are NOT front-line defense units. They're basically mobile point-defense guns, designed to cover a ship or base in case something breaks through the fighter screen. The exception being the Monster, its purpose is predominantly offensive.

Admittedly, they ARE more powerful than an entire 20th century tank division... but the same was true in the case of the original generation of Destroids as well. That was one of the Tomahawk's trials before its adoption by the UN Forces... taking on dozens of tanks at once and annihilating them in seconds with its advanced weaponry.



The Tomahawk MK II

Its name is Tomahawk II... Tomahawk Mk.II was a destroid from the early 2000s.



They are also deployed as riot control units (substituting rubber bullets in the autocannons and rail guns [...]

Actually, the mecha of choice for riot control would be the VF-2JA Icarus, since it has actual HANDS to grapple with.



Vehicle Type: AAV-TII Tomahawk
Class: Armored Artillery Vehicle (non-transformable)
Crew: Two to Three

AAV-TII is inconsistent with the UN Spacy's naming system... and has no basis in the source material, and I can't recall any instance of anyone referring to destroids as "Armored Artillery Vehicles" in the past. The crew size... well... it's one, not 2-3. The cockpit's tiny... where the heck do they think they're gonna put two more people?



Top Cannons: High-Powered Laser Cannons (2)

Particle beam cannons... the UN Spacy doesn't really use lasers much after the first space war, due to them being kind of underpowered.



Top Cannons: Three Mini-Missile Launchers

Don't exist.



The Defender-Ex MK III

The mecha's proper name is Defender EX, no Mark is ever assigned to it.



Vehicle Type [...]

This is gonna be a theme, so let's just take it as read that the Vehicle Type, Class, and Crew size is wrong and move on without further comment.



High-Powered Beam Cannons (2)

These are actually twin-linked anti-warship class railguns of the same type as that found on the VF-2SS Valkyrie II's Super Armed Pack. Needless to say, they're normally employed in the same overkill way that the VF-2SS's big railgun and the VF-1 Strike Valkyrie's beam cannon were... as a one-hit kill weapon for anti-aircraft work, though they're potent enough that the Defender EX also counts as a mobile anti-ship turret.



Mini-Missile Launchers (3 per arm)

Nope, these aren't there.

[keir451]

Eh, I could easily see that the "gods" of myth and legend were based off of contact with the Protoculture race as their technology would seem like magic to those early peoples. As far as coming back, well I realize that that's what the creators say, but ya never truly know. Plus it's always possible that with their level of tech they might have extremely long lifespans, so a few dozen of them remained behind to shepherd and watch over their "children" but they deliberately "sank" "Atlantis" (y'know the colony ship from DYRL) as means of avoiding attention and maybe they kinda died off as once they hid the ship they wouldn't have had access to all of their technology and may have succumbed to disease or injury. And over time the names of things entered our lexicon and became corrupted into what would become "Gilgamesh" and "Marduk", etc. also if Ingues and his people are really "pure blood" descendants of the Protoculture then maybe, somehwere in his databanks, these names were lisited and he chose to use them.
I actually did a scenario in which the PCs raided the Catholic church and discovered this "Armor of Mars" and it turned out to be a Gilgamesh Type I, and the entire story of Mesopotamian "Gilgamesh" was due to this armor, as were the stories of Ares and Mars and many of the other "gods" and the Catholic church had been hiding this away for all these millenia.

[Seto Kaiba]

Eh, I could easily see that the "gods" of myth and legend were based off of contact with the Protoculture race as their technology would seem like magic to those early peoples.

More likely based off very badly distorted oral histories passed down from the period when the Protoculture had an active colony on Earth and were reengineering the local life.

As far as coming back, well I realize that that's what the creators say, but ya never truly know.

If they came back, they probably would've resumed trying to colonize Earth and raised their city from the seafloor where they left it. They never did, so it's a pretty safe bet that they didn't.

[Arnie100]

I'd love a .pdf of this...

[jaymz]

Arnie - I'll PM you the next best thing in some respects....

[keir451]

Eh, I could easily see that the "gods" of myth and legend were based off of contact with the Protoculture race as their technology would seem like magic to those early peoples.

More likely based off very badly distorted oral histories passed down from the period when the Protoculture had an active colony on Earth and were reengineering the local life.

As far as coming back, well I realize that that's what the creators say, but ya never truly know.

If they came back, they probably would've resumed trying to colonize Earth and raised their city from the seafloor where they left it. They never did, so it's a pretty safe bet that they didn't.

Entirely possible, but not as much fun to me at least.
I agree that they never came back that much IS evident, but it's still a possibility that some stayed behind, maybe acting as the afore mentioned shepherders or actually interbreeding wiht the loclas and just fading into abscurity. Maybe they left no information so as to cover their tracks, or if they did, Misa never had the chance to find out.

[Seto Kaiba]

The Phalanx MK IV (Upgrade)

This mecha's actual name is Phalanx Custom.



The robot assault vehicle is heavily armored and ponderously slow, but it carries the missile firepower of a battleship!

Now that's an exaggeration... the Phalanx is no less spry than any other Destroid, and it doesn't even come close to even a frigate's apocalyptic levels of firepower, let alone a battleship.



It has both long-range and short range capabilities, but its main purpose is to track and destroy enemy aircraft, spacecraft, and armored troops from a great distance.

Actually, its missiles are more on the order of medium-range missiles, and its principal purpose falls under the header of "Anti-Aircraft/Surface Defense". It's not really suited to be attacking ground troops, since its missiles are anti-aircraft ordinance.



Unlike the others, the Phalanx Mark IV "Upgrade" has been modified and equipped with two large jet thrusters and four smaller thrusters for greater mobility in space (it does not need the space jet pack the others need to maneuver in space).

Actually, what the "Custom" means in the name has never been succinctly explained... and the thrusters on the missile launchers and a similar bank of thrusters around the hips have been standard fixtures since the original Phalanx series.



Vehicle Type: [...]

Let's just go ahead and mark all this stuff as wrong and say no more about it... though the armament is listed correctly, which is a bit of a departure from the rest of the work.



The Monster MK II

Um... the Monster Mk.II is what was in the original Macross series and DYRL, the HWR-00-Mk.II Monster destroid. This mecha's name is actually the "Giant Monster", though it isn't actually that much bigger than the original.



The Monster Mark II is the largest of the mechanized ground troops. It serves as a walking Howitzer array with heavy cannon power - a sort of artillery version of the Phalanx in regard to raw firepower. It is mainly a defensive weapon, although its massive guns may be part of a front-line assault, as well as defense lien.

Well, points for them getting it right that a mecha called "Monster" might be the biggest, but it's more a walking capital ship gun turret than anything. It can deliver ordinance using indirect fire, but what the unit was really designed for was sitting pretty on the hull of a starship and letting rip with those big cannons... delivering thermonuclear reaction shells to enemy ships hypersonically.



Its primary purpose is to destroy enemy aircraft, spacecraft, and armored troops from a great distance.

Actually, its primary purposes is as an anti-starship gun platform.



The large drums on the sides of the robot are ammunition containers. The Monster II has no close range weapons because it is usually deployed with other robots, vehicles, and/or troops.

Missile launchers, actually... the Giant Monster is packing a substantial payload of defensive micro-missiles so it won't be dependent entirely upon other mecha for its defense the way the original was. Those ammo containers are really the close-range weapons the entry says it doesn't have. That's some irony there...



Vehicle Type: [...]

Moving right along...



Crew: Two

Probably three, actually... that's the number of crew that the original needed.



Running: [...]

The Giant Monster actually doesn't need to walk, EVER. It can move around using a combination of a gravity control system and hovercraft lift system, the legs are mostly there to be shock absorbers and points of articulation for targeting. In space, it moves around the deck with a linear drive system that doesn't involve walking either.



Long Range Cannons (6)

Anti-capital ship railguns.



AGA-1JF Assault, Ground & Air Jet Fighter

No idea where this one came from... the mecha's actual name is "GERWALKroid".



The AGA-1JF is an experimental hybrid mecha unit that is part of the ground forces but resembles a Valkyrie in gerwalk configuration and flies. It is commonly referred to simply as the AGA fighter.

Again, nothing experimental about it. The GERWALKroid was a (successful) attempt to create a destroid with the high mobility of a Valkyrie, and was developed to basically as an inexpensive VF substitute that could operate in a close air support role.



Best of all, the cost of construction is roughly half the expense of building a Valkyrie and even less if it is given a liquid fuel system rather than nuclear power (60% are still nuclear). Furthermore, three AGA fighters can be made in the same amount of time as one Valkyrie.

In all likelihood, the cost is actually even lower... the VF-1 was reported to cost ten times as much as a typical destroid. Still, a liquid fuel system? Fossil fuels went out of use over 80 years before the events seen in Macross II. Thermonuclear reaction power systems are dirt cheap to operate, there would never be an upside to a non-OTM power system... you'd sacrifice operating time, power output, and just about every other area of performance in the name of a fuel nobody has used since the early 2000s.

A GERWALKroid with conventional jet fuel could stay on station for hours. One with thermonuclear reaction power could stay on station continuously for days or even weeks.



Vehicle Type: [...]

Don't make me say it.



Crew: Two

One.



Forward Laser (1) [...]

Beam cannon, not laser.

The long-range missile launchers have FIVE missiles each (didn't the writers even look at the art?). This mecha has never been depicted as using a gun pod either, though it's not beyond reason that it could.

[Alpha 11]

Really loving the info! The one thing I caught that was so wrong was the Macross Cannon. They got a lot of the data wrong on that ship, from its size, to the rang of its main gun. And that's ok, I can wait a few weeks or more for that info.

[Lt Gargoyle]

this is very informative Seto. I am enjoying the read a lot. I too would like to get a copy of your finished work.

[keir451]

Absolutely! I believe jaymz has his own work ups on this stuff done w/Seto's assistance.

[Snake Eyes]

This is really cool.....

[jaymz]

My palladium stay rewrites were done with extensive talks with Seto.

His work, iirc, will not likely resemble the palladium system as we know it. I too want a copy of his completed material.

Anyone who wants mine just pm me as I won't share the links publicly for obvious reasons.

[Seto Kaiba]

And now, possibly the most anticipated set of corrections...


U.N. Spacy: Space Force (Page 23)
U.N. Spacy: Space Force

A public service announcement from the Department of Redundancy Department? Considering that what the "Spacy" in UN Spacy means is "Space Military", "UN Spacy Space Force" is just saying the same thing twice... like "Inspector Morse Detective". I'm not sure why this bothers me so much, but it does.



VF-1MS Metal Siren

Part of me wants to give Palladium a pass on this one, just because the Metal Siren didn't have an official designation until about 2002 when Macross.co.jp gave it one... but part of me is absolutely baffled by the way they seem to have forgotten that Macross II might - just might - exist in the same timeline with other Macross shows. The Metal Siren is clearly not a VF-1, so this designation makes no sense at all...

The actual, correct designation for this mecha is VA-1SS Metal Siren.



The VF-1MS Metal Siren Valkyrie space fighter is as powerful as the VF-2SS with a Super Armor Pack or "SAP Special" augmentation system! At the same time it is even faster and more maneuverable than the VF-2SS!!

Both claims are quite dubious... the Metal Siren certainly displays great agility, in part due to the fact the airframe includes a number of high-output thrust-vectoring sub-engines, wing binders, and some other big concessions to agility including a whole new mode devoted entirely to space dogfighting. Still, a VF-2SS's Super Armed Pack gives the VF-2SS the largest vernier complement of any VF, and it's carrying an extremely similar suite of armaments.

The difference is focus... the Valkyrie II is a jack-of-all-trades, the Metal Siren straddles the line between a space version of air interdiction and a surface attack plane.



Two powerful rail guns are stowed on each wing and can be fired in all three configurations. Heavy pulse lasers are mounted over the shoulders in the soldier configuration and just behind the cockpit in gerwalk. A set of light lasers are located on ecah hip in soldier and gerwalk configurations and the forward undercarriage in the gerwalk and jet configurations. The "big" gun is the powerful plasma spear which can fire a plasma bolt or be used as a mega-damage stabbing and striking weapon.

The first question that leaps to mind is "Why doesn't this match the listed weapons systems on the same bloody page?" The second is "Why are the guns on the hips listed as being in two places at once in the GERWALK configuration?"

The Metal Siren's gun pods are in fact railguns... very similar models to the heavy railgun carried by the VF-2JA Icarus. The problem is that the Metal Siren doesn't have laser weaponry... like all the other VFs from its era, the Metal Siren uses particle beam cannons as its built-in energy weapons. The so-called "Plasma Spear" is not a projectile weapon either... it's a powered combat blade.



The Marduk invasion in 2089 only proved that the U.N. Spacy needs to upgrade to this more advanced fighter and add other, versatile, giant robot vehicles to their forces.

Actually, by in large the Valkyrie II's did just fine and the Metal Siren is not described as having been put forward as its replacement. The lesson the UN Spacy learned was that they'd become complacent, after putting all their eggs in one basket and getting burned for it. Would it hurt to remind everyone that the Mardook invasion happened in 2091-2092?



Speed

Was a mediocre movie... wait... wrong thing. The Metal Siren's got the same four engine arrangement as the Valkyrie II, so we're looking at a top atmospheric flight speed in excess of Mach 5.5, so they're a little shy of the mark again.

Curiously, they don't list performance for the Metal Siren's fourth mode, Gundroid. Admittedly, the Running and Leaping wouldn't really figure into it, since the knee joint is immobile in Gundroid mode, and it flies every bit as fast as a fighter in space. (It probably wouldn't do so well in atmosphere, but that's no big deal since the mode was specifically made for space dogfighting.)



Statistical Data

The battroid mode height is pretty close to the mark... but the Metal Siren's about 17.27m long in fighter mode with the plasma spear affixed to the nose. Without it, it's less than 12m.



Weight: 41 tons fully loaded

This is a smaller plane than the VF-2SS... why would it weigh more than twice as much? Moreover, why does Palladium seem to think that every VF in Macross II weighs two or three times what the VF-1 despite being the same size? In all likelihood, this plane weighs less than 19 tonnes fully loaded, and the empty weight is close to 13 tonnes.



Power System

Like all VFs, destroids, and pretty much anything that isn't civilian consumer-grade tech, the Metal Siren uses a thermonuclear reaction power system. In this case, its two main thermonuclear reaction engines mounted in the lower legs, and the two smaller thermonuclear reaction engines in the "backpack". Circa 2081, a modern VF had a peak generator output of almost 4,000MW.

Still, the VF's endurance with a full fuel load is a matter of days, not years.



Weapons Systems

Not sure why this doesn't match the earlier statements in the book... but the Metal Siren's "Rapid-Fire Pulse Lasers" are actually large-bore particle beam cannons. The "MS-1 Autocannons"... those are a second set of beam cannons not dissimilar from the coaxial ones on the VF-2SS and VF-2JA. How the writers could think there's room for 10,000 bullets for a gun mounted on the side of the frigging intake... well, it's beyond me. The gun pods are railguns, the plasma spear is a powered combat blade only... but at least they got the missile count right.

As usual, ranges are 1/5th or less than what they should be.






VF-XX Zentran Space Fighter

This mecha's actual name, as literally written, reads: VF-XX Zentradian Valkyrie.



It was designed specifically for the micronized Zentran and Meltran troops who serve in the U.N. Spacy. The Zentran Space Fighter is a major part of the U.N. Spacy's Zentran Space-Force. 70% of the micronized Zentradi mecha pilots fly the VF-XX. [...]

This is wrong on all counts... the whole bloody paragraph.

The VF-XX Zentradian Valkyrie was, in point of fact, the first variable fighter developed to incorporate a host of new technologies and refinements acquired from the factory satellite the UN Spacy had captured after the 2054 Zentradi invasion force was defeated. In practical terms, it's the proof-of-concept for all the refinements that went into the development of the VF-2 series and Metal Siren.

On the most basic level, the VF-XX is a synthesis of humanity's Variable Fighter overtechnology and the Zentradi Army's battle suits. The technology acquired from that factory satellite led to improvements in overall durability, actuator systems, reaction power systems, energy weapons, and a host of other tech enhancements.

By 2091, the VF-XX had been supplanted by the VF-2, and then the VF-2SS as the main fighter used by the UN Spacy. It did serve as the main fighter for the UN Spacy's Zentradi forces for decades, but they were pushing thirty years old and were well into the process of being decommissioned in favor of the far newer VF-2SS Valkyrie II when the Mardook attacked. Several units still had a few reserved for officers, but most units had already exchanged them for the space-optimized VF-2SS.



The Zentran Valkyrie fighter is a versatile mecha specifically designed for use in space. Its shape is more that of a rocket. The VF-XX does not have the wings of an aircraft, but it is aerodynamically sound and functions reasonably well in an atmosphere.

From this, I think we can deduce that Palladium's writers had not yet heard of lifting body designs. The VF-XX was, for the record, every bit as much an all-regime fighter as its successor, the VF-2.



Located in the forward section, just under the nose is a plasma cannon.

Sadly, no. Those lasers aren't mentioned in official sources either. Almost nothing is, sad to say.



Once trapped inside Earth's gravity, it can not return to "space" under its own power and must hitch a ride in or on a larger spacecraft or use a space booster rocket similar to the one used by the SNN, Scramble News Network.

This wasn't true for the VF-1, why would it be true for a fighter that's fifty years newer and far more powerful?



Speed:

Like all of the post-2054 VFs, the VF-XX is at least able to get hypersonic at 30km.

Its weight is almost certainly half or less what's listed too.



Weapon Systems

Sadly, only one weapon is commented on anywhere, since the VF-XX is very much a background design... the plasma cannon, lasers, and missile launchers are all of Palladium's invention and have no connection to the line art or anything else. The gun pod is, by what evidence exists, a human-built version of the same laser machine gun that the Nousjadeul-Ger habitually carries... an extremely high-powered large-bore laser weapon. It does not possess the secondary features described in the entry.




I'm not going to get into the details, but the UN Spacy doesn't use the original Zentradi mecha in their forces, and haven't for something like sixty years.

[jaymz]

Don't forget the VA-1SS's nasty super dimensional energy wave that can essentially destroy a zentraedi capital ship with one "release"

[Seto Kaiba]

Macross Cannon (Page 36)

This is a giant, transformable, space battleship similar in design to the first, legendary Macross Super-Dimensional Fortress. Unlike the multi-versatile Macross Space Fortress, which once served as a trans-atmospheric space station, battleship, and combat vessel, the Macross Cannons are strictly spacecraft and are about half the size of their predecessor.

I am honestly at a loss to explain how the writer could have been so disastrously wrong unless he hadn't actually seen the show or looked at the art. The whole game is a monument to poor research practices, but this statement ignores almost everything established about ships in Macross and the visuals we get from the OVA itself.

One look at it, and any person could tell you that the Macross Cannon looks like it's made out of four of the Zentradi's Nupetiet-Vergnitzs-class fleet command battleships. Those big old 4 kilometer-long flagships that lead Zentradi branch fleets like the one Britai captained. Believe me, there's a reason the Macross Cannon-class gunships look that way... it's because they totally are. This class is a practical extension of the painfully limited Grand Cannon concept... a BFG of legendary scale that, unlike its predecessor, can go wherever it darn well pleases to unleash apocalyptic levels of firepower.

Far from being half the size of the Macross, this masterpiece of dimension weaponry is the single largest human-built warship in all of Macross... at a hefty 6 kilometers long in fortress mode, and 4km in storming attack mode. Like every ship in Macross (except the old Oberth-class), this ship can operate just fine in atmosphere and even make a water landing if its captain cares to. Ships so big don't often do so, but it's perfectly possible. The Macross Cannons don't carry much in the way of more traditional defenses though, most of their mass is a means to the end that is those massive anti-fleet super dimension energy cannons of theirs, and they rely pretty heavily on their escorting fleet between firings.



Speed: Flying in space

I won't get into the physics of space flight and how unrealistic a top speed in space is, but ships in the Macross universe can cruise at speeds far faster than this. The Macross, by now a technologically primitive ship, was able to cruise at speeds of over 240 kilometers a second (or about Mach 700 if you're hellbent on Mach) during its cruise from Pluto's orbit back to Earth. Still, it takes days or weeks to make the trip from Earth to another planet like that, so for pretty much any long trip a ship will make a fold to get there.

Before you ask, yes it DOES have a fold system. ALL ships in Macross do... with the sole exception of humanity's very first space warship, the Oberth-class guided missile destroyer. Even the ARMDs were designed with fold systems, though the first eight or so didn't have theirs installed yet when things finally came to a head in the first space war.



The Main Disintegration Cannons (2)

I'm not sure why this entry seems to believe the four, completely identical cannons that the Macross Cannon-class sports are two different types of weapon. All four are massively upgunned versions of the heavy converging beam cannon sported by the Nupetiet-Vergnitzs-class battleships that were used as the basis for the ship's design. I'm not sure what a "disintegration cannon" is supposed to be... but the heavy converging beam cannons on the Macross Cannon-class gunships are massive fold-effect dimension weapons that fire an enormously powerful fusion plasma beam made up of matter from super dimension space. Each cannon has hundreds of times the firepower of the old Macross's main gun system, and is perfectly capable of dispatching a modest Zentradi branch fleet in one shot if they're fool enough to stay close together.

Like other super dimension energy cannons of this scale, its range is in excess of 1 light second (300,000 kilometers) and the combined beam is several kilometers across, though it's so massively destructive that even being within a few hundred meters of the beam is a death sentence for ships and mecha alike.

(The exact recharge rate for a full-power shot isn't stated, but it's probably more than the 1 minute that the books list, considering how much more powerful the gun is than the gun it was based on.)



Space Command Ship & Carrier

How they got this is another mystery for the ages... the Heracles has, right there on its line art as clear as day, that the ship is a "Large Battleship". Practically all types of ships in Macross carry at least a few mecha for defense though, but there are no real dedicated carriers in Macross II.

The Heracles-type is basically a simplified version of the Macross-class with a mixture of both human-developed overtechnology and overtechnology acquired from the Zentradi and Meltrandi. It isn't much different from the Macross in terms of size or armament though, being about 1.2km long and armed with a massive super dimension energy cannon on the bow and a multitude of converging beam cannons across the hull in turrets.

I'll probably talk more about what's wrong with the ships systems of note in the Deck Plans bit later on.

The stated top speed of .20c is overkill, it's more like .0007c, comparable to the Macross's sublight cruise speed... though again, they don't use sublight for trips much longer than a light second or two. It's just easier to fold where you want to be.



Space Battleship

Well, at least this one is identified correctly... the Gloria-type is a battleship. It's definitely not a small one though, being almost as big as the Heracles. Basically, lather, rinse, repeat what I said above.

[Alpha 11]

Keep up the great work!

[camk4evr]

I wish you could post the stats, Seto (I'd like a copy of your completed work too).

[keir451]

I wish you could post the stats, Seto (I'd like a copy of your completed work too).

jaymz has stats. The closest we'll get.

[Seto Kaiba]

I wish you could post the stats, Seto (I'd like a copy of your completed work too).

[...] The closest we'll get.

Man, you know we're not allowed to (publicly) post links to outside sites with stats either... (you might wanna edit it to remove that link 'fore the mods warn you).

I agree that they never came back that much IS evident, but it's still a possibility that some stayed behind, maybe acting as the afore mentioned shepherders or actually interbreeding wiht the loclas and just fading into abscurity. Maybe they left no information so as to cover their tracks, or if they did, Misa never had the chance to find out.

It's unlikely, given what's said in the movie and official material, that any Protoculture stayed behind on Earth... they're said to have fled into space after sinking Altira and abandoning their colonization efforts when the conflict between the Zentradi and Meltrandi moved towards the Sol system. If any had come back, Altira's main computer probably would have raised the city, since it interpreted the Zentradi fleet's arrival as the return of the Protoculture.

this is very informative Seto. I am enjoying the read a lot. I too would like to get a copy of your finished work.

If you think this is something, you should see the main timeline Macross homebrew... it's set to span sixty-six years of timeline (1999-2065), assuming Big West doesn't further extend said timeline via the new series that's in the works, though that's going to end up a multi-volume work before we're done, I think.

[keir451]

I wish you could post the stats, Seto (I'd like a copy of your completed work too).

[...] The closest we'll get.

Man, you know we're not allowed to (publicly) post links to outside sites with stats either... (you might wanna edit it to remove that link 'fore the mods warn you).

I agree that they never came back that much IS evident, but it's still a possibility that some stayed behind, maybe acting as the afore mentioned shepherders or actually interbreeding wiht the loclas and just fading into abscurity. Maybe they left no information so as to cover their tracks, or if they did, Misa never had the chance to find out.

It's unlikely, given what's said in the movie and official material, that any Protoculture stayed behind on Earth... they're said to have fled into space after sinking Altira and abandoning their colonization efforts when the conflict between the Zentradi and Meltrandi moved towards the Sol system. If any had come back, Altira's main computer probably would have raised the city, since it interpreted the Zentradi fleet's arrival as the return of the Protoculture.

this is very informative Seto. I am enjoying the read a lot. I too would like to get a copy of your finished work.

If you think this is something, you should see the main timeline Macross homebrew... it's set to span sixty-six years of timeline (1999-2065), assuming Big West doesn't further extend said timeline via the new series that's in the works, though that's going to end up a multi-volume work before we're done, I think.

Unlikely? Probably. Impossible? You never know. Just because the show states one thing doesn't mean I can't theorize on another approach. It just means that it's not "officially supported". And again it's not a question of "coming back" my theory is that a few of them never left. They stayed behind when the others left but chose to never access the colony ship again for fear of potentailly alerting outside forces to their presence.

[Seto Kaiba]

Unlikely? Probably. Impossible? You never know.

If they came back or never left, they probably would've kept some of their technology with them... which would almost certainly have survived the intervening millennia and been detected when humanity adopted cross-dimension radar systems. Altira only remained hidden because the Protoculture deliberately set out to make sure it couldn't be detected, and buried it on the seafloor under twenty thousand years of ocean sediment. (More than one Macross story has had cross-dimension radar systems pick up the energy emissions of Protoculture constructs like the Birdhuman or the various intact systems on Ouroboros.)


Gonna dig into some more fun stuff once I get home... the unnamed Mardook combat mecha that the RPG calls the "Annihilator" is next, followed by the deck plans books.

[Lt Gargoyle]

My palladium stay rewrites were done with extensive talks with Seto.

His work, iirc, will not likely resemble the palladium system as we know it. I too want a copy of his completed material.

Anyone who wants mine just pm me as I won't share the links publicly for obvious reasons.

PMed you.

[keir451]

Unlikely? Probably. Impossible? You never know.

If they came back or never left, they probably would've kept some of their technology with them... which would almost certainly have survived the intervening millennia and been detected when humanity adopted cross-dimension radar systems. Altira only remained hidden because the Protoculture deliberately set out to make sure it couldn't be detected, and buried it on the seafloor under twenty thousand years of ocean sediment. (More than one Macross story has had cross-dimension radar systems pick up the energy emissions of Protoculture constructs like the Birdhuman or the various intact systems on Ouroboros.)


Gonna dig into some more fun stuff once I get home... the unnamed Mardook combat mecha that the RPG calls the "Annihilator" is next, followed by the deck plans books.

Only if their tech was still active. Like I said, I KNOW it's not the "official" line, but if you take a step back form the OSM and look at the various myths and legends in light of the existance of the Protoculture race then you kinda see that some of tthe stories can be attributed to high tech and the possible inteference of the Protoculture. If their power sources ran out long ago and the mecha were either destroyed or buried then the Macross wouldn't have picked it up. Plus I could totally see the Catholic church finding a Marduk battle suit and hiding it from the rest of the world as the existance of such a thing could undermine their hegemony, especially if it was found during the Crusades or some other time when the Church was the dominant power in Europe. Not everything has to be "according to the story" if we only did that, then there'd be no point in putting forth our own interpretations on things for fun.
I look forward to your interpretations of the deck plans.

[Seto Kaiba]

Only if their tech was still active. [...]

Not necessarily... they were able to detect the Birdhuman in Macross Plus, and that thing was both dormant and in pieces.

Like I said, I KNOW it's not the "official" line, but if you take a step back form the OSM and look at the various myths and legends in light of the existance of the Protoculture race then you kinda see that some of tthe stories can be attributed to high tech and the possible inteference of the Protoculture.

Eh, as the Zentradi are only slightly altered from humanity's basic genome and were only interested in an otherwise uninspiring pack of ungrateful little half-monkeys like humanity as a labor force that could work on preparing the planet for eventual large-scale colonization, so I doubt any would have stuck around on Earth after plans to colonize the planet were abandoned when the conflict between the Zentraid and the Meltrandi rolled Earth's way. Even if they did, they wouldn't live long enough to have much of an impact, maybe a century at best.

Maybe I'm just opposed to it because it sounds like a lot of the claptrap on that show Ancient Aliens, and I hate Giorgio Tsoukalos and his stupid hair for his insane belief that humans couldn't even stack rocks on other rocks without an ET pointing out the basics.




More Marduk Data
Marduk Annihilator

Its actual name is singularly uninspiring... Mardook Variable Combat Mecha.



New Type Power Armor

What is their unholy fetish with the words "Power Armor"? Unless the Mardook have a legion of Zentradi circus contortionists we don't know about... that's rather unlikely, don't you think? This is actually more along the lines of a halfway point between a battle pod and battle suit, with a single Zentradi pilot in its distinctly Regult-like torso and a two-mode transformation that flips between fighter pod and battle suit.



The Mardook Annihilator is a transformable, prototype mecha designed specifically for the invasion of Earth.

It's not a prototype, and it was part of the Mardook inventory before they even discovered Earth. I don't know why they keep trying to label everything a prototype or experimental or powered armor. Considering they allege that it makes 5% of the Mardook mechanized forces, that'd mean there were thousands of 'em out there... that's called mass production, boys and girls. A prototype is a test machine you build just a few of.



The humanoid shape of the soldier configuration gives it all-terrain and combat capabilities.

If you look carefully at art - or look at all, really - you'll notice that those "legs" are purely cosmetic and don't have a knee joint! Also, their grammar sucks, are they really asserting that it can't fight in fighter mode?



Located in the forward nose section is a plasma cannon.

As opposed to the rear nose section? Aircraft usually only have a nose on one end, y'know?

Seriously though, plasma weapons are RARE in Macross... this is actually a particle beam gun that's not dissimilar from the other beam gun in its weapon arm or the kind found on most any battle pod.



Behind it and to the side are two forward facing laser nozzles. Each nozzle faces forward, but can swivel in a 45 degree angle in all directions.

Nope, this is ALSO a beam gun... admittedly it's not that different from a Regult's weapons. Whether the ports in the chest are also beam guns is not stated, but their placement makes it likely IMO.



In soldier mode, the big rocket and laser gun becomes the right arm.

Well, the right arm is the right arm... but it's "Funnel missile" and "beam gun", not laser and rocket.



Crew:

One giant Zentradi soldier in a cramped cockpit in the chest... the poor bugger.



Rocket and Laser Gun

The right arm is, in fact, a combination of a beam cannon like that found elsewhere on the body, and a missile launcher that fires funnel missiles... and yes, when I say "funnel" I mean like in Gundam (in practical terms). The missiles fired by the missile launcher are actually small, self-propelled quad-beam guns that, when launched, chase their target down and spray it with particle beam gun fire from a tiny quartet of battery-driven beam emitters located at 90 degree angles around the missile's body. It has limited range and the guns are only good for a few shots before being exhausted, but the gun ports on those missiles can fire at angles of up to 45 degrees off the axis of flight, making them very difficult to evade completely.



Interrogator O.C.C.
The Marduk Interrogators are a branch of the female Emulators.

Which would be why the one in the OVA has a male voice actor in both the original and English audio? Looks like a dude, sounds like a dude, and can't be anything but a dude because the women are all Emulators.

[keir451]

Maybe I'm just opposed to it because it sounds like a lot of the claptrap on that show Ancient Aliens, and I hate Giorgio Tsoukalos and his stupid hair for his insane belief that humans couldn't even stack rocks on other rocks without an ET pointing out the basics.

He wasn't the first to propose such an idea; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_von_D%C3%A4niken. Though even his work has been called into question. It's not even that I truly believe this idea it's just that in some ways it has some logic to it if looked at from that angle. Heck it's not even as if they showed us how to stack the rocks, but their presence (what there may have been of it) inspired us to certain things. Also it wouldn't be the first time in hostory that some one (or even some ones) decided to jump ship or "go over the wall" as we say in anthropology. Is it extremely unlikely? Sure. But that's what imaginations are for, after all, to say "Hey, what about this?".

Part of the problem may even be that DYRL was meant to be an internal movie w/in the main Macross story line itself, and didn't take into account or even reference Macross Zero. According to what you've told me the Macross didn't detect the artificial island until long AFTER it had risen and it was just sitting there powered down and hidden. So a unit that had no power source and had been buried for millenia would also likely escape detection.

[Seto Kaiba]

Macross II: Deck Plans Volume One
Better known as "That Unholy Mess"

An Avenue to Adventure
[...] These books will present never before seen information and floor plans for the various spaceships under the command of the U.N. Spacy and Marduk invasion force. Of course, some of the information is pure conjecture on our part, based on analysis of the weapons and action in the animated series.

*sigh* In this case, when they say "Some" they really mean "All"... the reason it's never-before-seen is it isn't based on anything official and has little-to-no connection to the actual show.



Other elements were gleaned from Japanese translations and animation model sheets.

If they were, then how in the nine hells did this book miss the mark so completely?



Energy Weapons (Page 8-9)

All ships in Macross II carry hundreds of lasers.

*sigh* No ship in Macross II uses laser weaponry. Very few classes of ship in Macross make use of laser weapons even for point defense. The few that did upgraded to beam machine gun defenses within a decade or so. Lasers weapons in general are few and far between, because the only thing they had in their favor was accuracy... so the only place they were commonly applied was coaxial guns which were mounted on a Valkyrie's monitor turret, though improvements in beam weapons have largely ousted 'em from that niche too in both Macross universes.

Ships in the Macross universe(s) are armed with super dimension energy cannons... also known as converging beam cannons. These weapons use the same higher-dimension physics as fold systems and operate by using a fold resonance pattern to draw high-mass exotic matter from super dimension space into our three-dimensional universe, triggering a fusion reaction in it that is focused into a beam of high energy fusion plasma moving at a not-insignificant fraction of the speed of light. Consequentially, they tend to be weapons against which there's little defending, and are enormously scaleable. They run the gambit from small enough to fit on a VF's head (in the main timeline) to the Grand Cannons and massive main guns on Zentradi and Meltrandi mobile fortresses... guns with calibers measured in miles that have firepower enough to wipe out a fleet of hundreds of thousands. Even small shipboard turrets can, with time to aim, cleanly hit targets as small as an island only 2km across from a light second away. Those turrets usually aren't used at such long ranges though, and the only real difference between the turret weapons and the "main gun" style weapons is scale... otherwise, they're the same tech.

Consequentially, I'm not going to dissect every single "laser" entry, because I've already covered it...



Ship Size Chart

The Mardook and Zentradi ship sizes are actually accurate... but the Macross Cannon is, as I previously noted, SIX KILOMETERS LONG. It's half-again the size of that flagship at the top. The ship that they'd labeled as an "Escort Carrier" is actually a Rescue Ship, but the size is in the ballpark at least.



Fold System: None

This is a recurring issue in almost every human ship's entry, so I'm gonna say it once and get it out of the way. EVERY HUMAN SHIP HAS A FOLD SYSTEM. In some cases, Palladium is saying this in defiance of the footage that shows ships defolding.

Practically every human ship in the entirety of Macross has had, or been designed to have, its own fold system. The only class of ships that didn't was the very first space warship: the Oberth-class space destroyer. Even the ARMD-class ships had fittings for a fold system, though the original few built before the end of the first space war hadn't had theirs installed yet when most of them were lost in battle. Every ship built after the war has its own fold system.



Main Engine: Auto Heat Pile System
Auxiliary Engine: Fusion reactor type

Ships use the same thermonuclear reaction overtechnology, but on a much larger scale than what powers mecha like Valkyries, Destroids, or Zentradi battle pods and battle suits. Unlike most SF, they don't use a single big, central reactor that can be taken out and leave the ship defenseless. Instead, ships employ a cluster (or several clusters) or smaller reactors running at less than full power so there's a reserve that it can draw on in combat and losing a few reactors or taking them offline for maintenance doesn't leave the ship at less than full strength.

Thermonuclear reaction furnaces and other similar power systems use the same physics as fold drives and converging beam cannons to carry out a fusion-like process using extra-dimensional physics that provides enormous amounts of power at high efficiency for very small amounts of fuel, doesn't produce any harmful radiation, and can run on a diverse array of fuels. The preferred fuel is hydrogen, meaning that ships can refuel just about anywhere in the universe. The galaxy is your gas station!



UN Spacy Escort Carrier

The size is about right, but this ship is in fact called a Rescue Ship in the official materials... there are no weapons mentioned for it. They're not used on the front lines, and are strictly for combat search and rescue operations.



Zentran Command Ship
The Zentran Command Ship was the second most powerful ship in the original Zentran armada. It was placed under the command of low-ranking officers and was used as a flagship for groups of a dozen ships up to small fleets of thirty vessels.

Actually, the Queadol-Magdomilla-class was classified as a fleet command battleship and served in much the same capacity as the larger Nupetiet-Vergnitzs. They were the flagships of fleets which numbered over 1,200 ships, secondary flagships for branch fleets, and mobile headquarters for the some aerial armored divisions like the famous "Quamzin Klan".

Calling them the Zentradi Army's second most powerful ship is probably stretching the truth, when they don't measure up to the firepower of the larger Nupetiet-Vergnitzs-class, or the medium-scale gun destroyers, to say nothing of the mobile fortresses which outgun EVERYTHING by a terrifying margin.



Zentran Destroyer

Zentradi Battleship.



Marduk Flagship

Exactly as it says, this is the Mardook's modified equivalent to the Nupetiet-Vergnitzs class. In all likelihood the ratio is closer to the Zentradi Army's, with something like one or two for every 1,200 ships. Their Mardook crews are principally confined to the bridge tower that was not part of the original design.

Like most of the Zentradi and Mardook ships in these books, the mecha counts have been substantially exaggerated. The authors seem to forget that these ships host crews 5 times the height of a human, which means that in practical terms they're 1/5th the size in every dimension that counts. They don't employ stasis either, the crew size of a typical Zentradi warship is only about 1,500, not almost thirty thousand. In all likelihood, the actual mecha counts should be 1/100th what is listed here. Consider that the Macross, which was one and a half times the usable volume in terms of the size of the crew to the size of the ship, only hosted about 300 fighters in the original series (more in DYRL, but only because it had TWO carriers stapled to it instead of one).

Actually, this raises a proofreading problem in the book... this ship is listed with 28,516 crew, but 31,500 combat-ready mecha. How do they have more combat-ready mecha than they have people by almost three thousand?



Marduk Battleship

"Mardook Large Warship" is actually what's written... but this is close enough.



The Battleship possesses some special features:
1- Hyperspace communications: [...]
2- Emulator chambers

Well, the first is not a special feature for ANY ship. The fold systems used on ships in Macross are not just for traveling long distances by fold jump, they also contain the ship's fold communications suite and long-range faster-than-light sensor systems. The range of both varies from ship to ship, but a fold communications suite is usually good for a range of at least a few hundred light years without any relay stations. Bigger ships can push this to thousands or tens of thousands of light years without difficulty.

Emulator chambers are something practically every Mardook ship has, so that ain't special either... even Feff's dinky little scoutship had one. The Mardook depend on their emulators to control their Zentradi in battle, so no ship would be without one.



Marduk Base

Mardook mobile fortress.



Indeed, the Marduk base is different in that it is, in technical jargon, a sound sensitive, silicon-based semi-living mothership.

That's not really a point of distinction... the Zentradi of the DYRLverse use living bio-technology parts in virtually all of their ships and mecha. That's part of the reason their ships and mecha have that organic aesthetic inside and out in DYRL. Their rival power, the Meltrandi, use purely inorganic technology. The commander of the Mardook mobile fortress, Lord Ingues, and the mecena who attended him are basically living, sentient, bio-technological computers... and the pseudo-organic technology of the ship means it's semi-living and has a very sentient brain.

It's unlikely that there's a Mardook city hidden in what is ostensibly a nomadic warship.

Its armaments include a main polarizing converging beam cannon system like those on the Zentradi and Meltrandi mobile fortresses, though it has three barrels scattered around the ship's perimeter that leave few blind spots for a weapon that has tens of thousands of times the firepower of the main gun of ships like the Macross. It also boasts a fold weapon that can fold superheated plasma onto the battlefield like tiny stars from colossal distances (on the order of light-days) and potentially destroy fleets. The outer hull's got innumerable high-powered converging beam cannons as well, for defensive purposes, but with main weapons and an escorting fleet it almost never needs to USE them.

[Seto Kaiba]

Part of the problem may even be that DYRL was meant to be an internal movie w/in the main Macross story line itself, and didn't take into account or even reference Macross Zero.

Er... not quite. You see, the Macross: Do You Remember Love? movie was conceived and produced as an alternate version of the events of the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series. That bit about it being a movie-within-the-universe is a status that was assigned to it in 1994, in a booklet on Macross continuity that was included with the first volume of the Macross Plus OVA. With the alternate set of sequels presented by Macross Plus and Macross 7's near simultaneous release they put the pamphlet out to clarify matters of continuity... and that included assigning DYRL the role of being an in-universe film from 2031. That's why when they made Macross II, they used DYRL as its version of space war 1... at the time, they could have gone with either version, but the writers appear to have favored DYRL.

According to what you've told me the Macross didn't detect the artificial island until long AFTER it had risen and it was just sitting there powered down and hidden. So a unit that had no power source and had been buried for millenia would also likely escape detection.

Remember, the city of Altira emerged after the orbital bombardment but before the Macross returned to Earth. Hikaru and Misa discovered it and were living there when the Macross got back. Prior to that, it had been intentionally concealed from detection by the Protoculture when they fled the planet twenty-plus thousand years ago.

There's a difference between simply "powered down and forgotten" and "actively hidden".

[Snake Eyes]

Correct me if i'm wrong, but i read that the Macross II story is now an alternate timeline, and that it is no longer part of the Macross story

[Alpha 11]

My palladium stay rewrites were done with extensive talks with Seto.

His work, iirc, will not likely resemble the palladium system as we know it. I too want a copy of his completed material.

Anyone who wants mine just pm me as I won't share the links publicly for obvious reasons.

PMed you.

Second.

[Seto Kaiba]

Correct me if i'm wrong, but i read that the Macross II story is now an alternate timeline, and that it is no longer part of the Macross story

Officially, the Macross II: Lovers Again OVA and the other titles of its chronology exist as part of a "parallel world" timeline. It's a separate universe from the other chronology established when Macross Plus and Macross 7 came out in 1994, which has been continued by subsequent sequels.

It has not, contrary to popular myth, been disowned in any way by Macross's owners. It's still very prominently featured on the franchise's official web site, a remastered HD edition is coming out soon, the official Macross encyclopedia Macross Chronicle* has devoted a whole section to it in both its original and Revised & Expanded edition (including several covers), and they've been periodically releasing new Macross II merchandise over the past six or so years. The Macross Ultimate Frontier PSP game even included the Macross II mecha and an unlockable story campaign for same, which was a great surprise.



* The VF-2SS Valkyrie II and VA-1SS Metal Siren have both been featured cover mecha, the Revised and Expanded edition's 74th Volume that comes out in a month has the Metal Siren.

[Snake Eyes]

Cool, thanks for pointing that out........

[Alpha 11]

Correct me if i'm wrong, but i read that the Macross II story is now an alternate timeline, and that it is no longer part of the Macross story

Officially, the Macross II: Lovers Again OVA and the other titles of its chronology exist as part of a "parallel world" timeline. It's a separate universe from the other chronology established when Macross Plus and Macross 7 came out in 1994, which has been continued by subsequent sequels.

It has not, contrary to popular myth, been disowned in any way by Macross's owners. It's still very prominently featured on the franchise's official web site, a remastered HD edition is coming out soon, the official Macross encyclopedia Macross Chronicle* has devoted a whole section to it in both its original and Revised & Expanded edition (including several covers), and they've been periodically releasing new Macross II merchandise over the past six or so years. The Macross Ultimate Frontier PSP game even included the Macross II mecha and an unlockable story campaign for same, which was a great surprise.

* The VF-2SS Valkyrie II and VA-1SS Metal Siren have both been featured cover mecha, the Revised and Expanded edition's 74th Volume that comes out in a month has the Metal Siren.

And of course, because of HG, we will never see an office release here, in the USA in English dub. For most of that stuff, anyways.

[glitterboy2098]

given macross DYRL was made an "in universe movie" for the main timeline, would macross II also be an "in universe film/ova" as well? (would certainly explain some of the music appearing in macross 7 in the 'battle of the bands' bit..)