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Okay, I don't like the Archangel. It's a terrible idea for a colony shiop, both too much and not enough and honestly, why did you need them.

The earth has thousands of zentraedi hulls, and a factory designed to build them. Not only that, but it may not be wise to use them against the masters, because the masters obviously know every last weakness in the zentreadi war machine.

So how many people could be placed abord a modified zentreadi cargo ship of flagship?

mech798 wrote:Okay, I don't like the Archangel. It's a terrible idea for a colony shiop, both too much and not enough and honestly, why did you need them.

The earth has thousands of zentraedi hulls, and a factory designed to build them. Not only that, but it may not be wise to use them against the masters, because the masters obviously know every last weakness in the zentreadi war machine.

So how many people could be placed abord a modified zentreadi cargo ship of flagship?

without status. between 40 thousand. using the city of San Fransisco as my guide. the city has 17K+ per square mile So if done right I imagine you could build a nice little city inside and when it arrives have it land and begin to dismantle the out side hull to open up and expand your city.

mech798 wrote:Okay, I don't like the Archangel. It's a terrible idea for a colony shiop, both too much and not enough and honestly, why did you need them.

The earth has thousands of zentraedi hulls, and a factory designed to build them. Not only that, but it may not be wise to use them against the masters, because the masters obviously know every last weakness in the zentreadi war machine.

So how many people could be placed abord a modified zentreadi cargo ship of flagship?

Well they put 70k civilians on to the SDF-1 plus whatever her crew count is (per dialogue). Most Zentreadi ships are bigger than the SDF-1 (IINM of the stated ships in the old RT.com infopedia only one was smaller than the SDF-1: the Scout Ship). So if you put the Zent. ships in relation to the SDF-1 in terms of size, you can get some multipliers.

One of the limiters isn't necessarily space, but a matter of life support. You will need to provide breathable air, water, heat management, and food. Gravity they can do without, if one is willing to deal with the consequences, but the others are absolutely critical. How long you intend to transport them (and before they have agriculture to sustain them) will be a factor as well. While you can recycle air and water, those systems are not going to be 100% perfect either. You can grow food, but that places more strain on the life support. Heat management is critical to (the old Skylab when it was launched sustained damage in this area that made it uncomfortable until the first crew repaired it).

While they could use the RFS to build more Zentreadi ships, they would still have to convert them for use by a micronized crew. At which point it might have been easier to just design a purpose built and have it build it for you than convert existing designs.

ShadowLogan wrote:

mech798 wrote:Okay, I don't like the Archangel. It's a terrible idea for a colony shiop, both too much and not enough and honestly, why did you need them.

The earth has thousands of zentraedi hulls, and a factory designed to build them. Not only that, but it may not be wise to use them against the masters, because the masters obviously know every last weakness in the zentreadi war machine.

So how many people could be placed abord a modified zentreadi cargo ship of flagship?

Well they put 70k civilians on to the SDF-1 plus whatever her crew count is (per dialogue). Most Zentreadi ships are bigger than the SDF-1 (IINM of the stated ships in the old RT.com infopedia only one was smaller than the SDF-1: the Scout Ship). So if you put the Zent. ships in relation to the SDF-1 in terms of size, you can get some multipliers.

One of the limiters isn't necessarily space, but a matter of life support. You will need to provide breathable air, water, heat management, and food. Gravity they can do without, if one is willing to deal with the consequences, but the others are absolutely critical. How long you intend to transport them (and before they have agriculture to sustain them) will be a factor as well. While you can recycle air and water, those systems are not going to be 100% perfect either. You can grow food, but that places more strain on the life support. Heat management is critical to (the old Skylab when it was launched sustained damage in this area that made it uncomfortable until the first crew repaired it).

While they could use the RFS to build more Zentreadi ships, they would still have to convert them for use by a micronized crew. At which point it might have been easier to just design a purpose built and have it build it for you than convert existing designs.

Glitterboy2098 has a good example of a converted ship on his site.

While i think the SDF-1 is an awesome ship, to me it serves to be a plot device. the space used in the ship to build the city was not realistic at all. I prefer to think of it in a little more realistic view. So the SDF-1 is not gonna work. Also you are gonna need to have the supplies for when they land on the planet. Farming equipment, the animals they took with them to for their farms and ranches.

then there's the actual space needed for the ship functions. Look at an aircraft carrier. most of the crew are in tight spaces in the bunks. the ships basic functions take a lot of space here on the planet where they do not have to worry about air. then there is the space used for your mecha and your basic gear for the people.

the UEEF originally had a bunch of "Angel class" colony ships, for the trip out to tyrol, but these were effectively unarmed, though they were big, as big as the SDF-1. the angel class was all retired by 2040, due to their vulnerability to the invid and other threats. in prelude it was suggested they could be used for bulk shipping, eventually most of them were turned into the nuetron-S missiles used at reflex point (by loading the warheads the UEEF captured from T.R. Edwards over Optera in 2043)

as for the example on my website:

https://sites.google.com/site/thetemple ... es-freedom

the UES freedom wasn't really designed to be a colony ship proper, so much as a "galactic survey vessel", a deep range ship that would go out and find locations for colonies, which would then be settled by ships coming in from earth. since it would spend so much time away from earth and the more settled parts of human space, it got designed to carry as many creature comforts as possible.. which basically turned it into a sort of mobile military base (including dependant's housing and the other non-military support stuff)

except i had it end up serving as more of a flagship/fieldbase when the pioneer project (originally meant only for colonization) got hijacked by the mission to confront the robotech master's.

you'll also note i established that there were three such ships built. so you don't have to use the Freedom itself. handy if you want the ship but not the established history/metaplot for the ship.

i was thinking the sister ships could be "liberty" and "independence"

which is rather ironic naming given the UEG's decidedly socialistic and militaristic bent..

(and now that Robotech Marines is out i need to redo the 2028 compliment listings)

mech798 wrote:Okay, I don't like the Archangel. It's a terrible idea for a colony shiop, both too much and not enough and honestly, why did you need them.

Because the previous generation of colony ships they never got the chance to use* were apparently less defensible than a biscuit raft...

mech798 wrote:The earth has thousands of zentraedi hulls, and a factory designed to build them. Not only that, but it may not be wise to use them against the masters, because the masters obviously know every last weakness in the zentreadi war machine.

So how many people could be placed abord a modified zentreadi cargo ship of flagship?

Eh... Earth might've had thousands of Zentradi wrecks, but all told it looks like they only had a handful of ships still in good working order. The big obstacle there would be the expenditure of resources to restore a crashed ship vs. building a new one.

When working from a wreck, the only real disincentives to not reengineer the entire interior of the ship for human-sized crew is the time and materials involved. It took 10 years for them to do the SDF-1, and a Zentradi flagship is about four times the size, and it nearly ruined the entire world economy.

My view would be that they would most likely start from a vessel that was captured/surrendered intact, to minimize effort. Aiming for maximum efficiency in time, effort, and resources, the best way might be to remodel a working ship the way Breetai's was... to install apartments and other vital living and social quarters into the unused spaces in the ship's interior, and connect them with that same network of elevated moving walkways (or even roads for light vehicles). Leave the ship's crew at giant size and let them use the regular quarters and facilities for the ship's original crew with fittings on the bridge for vital miclone personnel, and build all the support infrastructure for the miclones into the interior spaces inaccessible to the Zentradi-size crew. During Rick and Lisa's escape from Breetai's men, we see utility spaces that are big enough to be Olympic swimming pools, easily convertible into recreational or agricultural space with a little work without affecting the ship's systems.

The 70,000+ people crammed onto the SDF-1 in the Macross Saga is said to have been an unsustainable population... but you could probably get 80,000 passengers plus the ship's regular crew into a Zentradi fleet command battleship without sacrificing one iota of the ship's offensive and defensive capability.

Seto Kaiba wrote:

mech798 wrote:Okay, I don't like the Archangel. It's a terrible idea for a colony shiop, both too much and not enough and honestly, why did you need them.

Because the previous generation of colony ships they never got the chance to use* were apparently less defensible than a biscuit raft...

Problem is you don't want to put guns on you rcolony ship. You want guns on its escorts so the bad guys don't have to shoot at your colony ship because it's the biggest threat on the field. Armor, engines and PD is what a colony ship needs, not big guns.

mech798 wrote:

Seto Kaiba wrote:

mech798 wrote:Okay, I don't like the Archangel. It's a terrible idea for a colony shiop, both too much and not enough and honestly, why did you need them.

Because the previous generation of colony ships they never got the chance to use* were apparently less defensible than a biscuit raft...

Problem is you don't want to put guns on you rcolony ship. You want guns on its escorts so the bad guys don't have to shoot at your colony ship because it's the biggest threat on the field. Armor, engines and PD is what a colony ship needs, not big guns.

That and if the enemy is close enough for you to shoot them with the colony ship, they are close enough to shoot the colony ship in return. The point of naval screens is to keep the enemy far enough away from things you don't want getting shot at all.

eliakon wrote:

mech798 wrote:

Seto Kaiba wrote:

mech798 wrote:Okay, I don't like the Archangel. It's a terrible idea for a colony shiop, both too much and not enough and honestly, why did you need them.

Because the previous generation of colony ships they never got the chance to use* were apparently less defensible than a biscuit raft...

Problem is you don't want to put guns on you rcolony ship. You want guns on its escorts so the bad guys don't have to shoot at your colony ship because it's the biggest threat on the field. Armor, engines and PD is what a colony ship needs, not big guns.

That and if the enemy is close enough for you to shoot them with the colony ship, they are close enough to shoot the colony ship in return. The point of naval screens is to keep the enemy far enough away from things you don't want getting shot at all.

I be willing to bet there is another thought as well in the defense. if your colony ship come under attack, you simply fold to a secondary predetermine location.

mech798 wrote:Problem is you don't want to put guns on you rcolony ship. You want guns on its escorts so the bad guys don't have to shoot at your colony ship because it's the biggest threat on the field. Armor, engines and PD is what a colony ship needs, not big guns.

Nah, you absolutely want guns on your emigrant ship... in fact, tactically speaking that's probably where you'd want to put the fleet's biggest guns. You want to have something genuinely powerful to fall back on in the event that you're faced with an enemy that's too strong for the escorts to handle alone.

Because the previous generation of colony ships they never got the chance to use

Once again, this is a flat out lie by someone parsing the very paragraph where it talks about the Angel-class Colony Ships. The Art of Shadow Chronicles states they were used until "continued hostilities in space made the galaxy too dangerous" and "previous Robotech Wars". Note the terms "continued", "hostilities", "previous", "Robotech" and "wars". They were decommissioned in 2043 as shown in Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles. Lancer in 2038 remarks that colonization was one of the long-term goals of The Gloval Initiative, as shown in Invasion. It boggles the mind how someone could interpret these as saying the Angel-class ships were never used as that calls into question their intelligence and/or honesty.....

Rabid Southern Cross Fan wrote:

Because the previous generation of colony ships they never got the chance to use

Once again, this is a flat out lie by someone parsing the very paragraph where it talks about the Angel-class Colony Ships. The Art of Shadow Chronicles states they were used until "continued hostilities in space made the galaxy too dangerous" and "previous Robotech Wars". Note the terms "continued", "hostilities", "previous", "Robotech" and "wars". They were decommissioned in 2043 as shown in Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles. Lancer in 2038 remarks that colonization was one of the long-term goals of The Gloval Initiative, as shown in Invasion. It boggles the mind how someone could interpret these as saying the Angel-class ships were never used as that calls into question their intelligence and/or honesty.....

he's also ignoring the comments in the canon comics that establish the UEEF actually planted colonies, in order to claim they never did.

glitterboy2098 wrote:he's also ignoring the comments in the canon comics that establish the UEEF actually planted colonies, in order to claim they never did.

There are no statements in the canon comics of any colonies outside the solar system... they mention only the fear that the Invid may conquer their colonies in the Sol system and then set their sights on universal domination. No colonies are mentioned in the RPG text either, not even in character creation. (They mention offworld military installations... but that's not quite the same thing, tho in AotSC they mention the military bases on the moon used to be colonies.)

But that's neither here nor there... the point in that statement is they built the Ark Angel-class because the Angel-class's lacking defenses rendered the ships useless for their intended purpose. I have to agree wholeheartedly with mech798 that there are better alternatives, especially early on.

talk about twisting the dialog around. the "rest of the universe" bit is presented in the context of the locations of human colonies..

glitterboy2098 wrote:talk about twisting the dialog around. the "rest of the universe" bit is presented in the context of the locations of human colonies..

No, it's a grammatically literal reading of the text... and the subject matter of the statement is not the location of human colonies, it's things General Reinhardt thinks the Invid will attempt to conquer if the UEEF doesn't nip the problem in the bud via scorched earth tactics.

Again, we're off-topic... I'll cheerfully continue this via PM, but not elsewhere, to avoid further derailment.

glitterboy2098 wrote:talk about twisting the dialog around. the "rest of the universe" bit is presented in the context of the locations of human colonies..

Naturally, as its rather clear that Reinhardt's dialogue utilizes the Oxford Comma, which links "our colonies" to "and the rest of the universe". Had Reinhardt been separating the rest of the universe he would have said "eventually moving on to our colonies on the Moon & Mars and then the rest of the universe".

For the grammatically challenged: Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

i cannot see a production run of ships being built and then not even used. I will not say that once a certain amount had run into trouble they would discontinue production and they would likely retro fit the others, as per dialog.

Seto Kaiba wrote:

mech798 wrote:Problem is you don't want to put guns on you rcolony ship. You want guns on its escorts so the bad guys don't have to shoot at your colony ship because it's the biggest threat on the field. Armor, engines and PD is what a colony ship needs, not big guns.

Nah, you absolutely want guns on your emigrant ship... in fact, tactically speaking that's probably where you'd want to put the fleet's biggest guns. You want to have something genuinely powerful to fall back on in the event that you're faced with an enemy that's too strong for the escorts to handle alone.

Tactically speaking you would not want your big guns on a colony ship. You would want your big guns on a battleship where you can bring them to bear on the enemy when you want to use them and not risk losing the fleet core.
Since the heart of a colony fleet is the colony ships you want to protect them not use them as front line weapons. And you build big guns on naval ships to use, not to keep in case of emergencies and only fire when there is five minutes until the close of the episode.

Lt Gargoyle wrote:i cannot see a production run of ships being built and then not even used. I will not say that once a certain amount had run into trouble they would discontinue production and they would likely retro fit the others, as per dialog.

I can... if the ships were constructed after the 2nd Robotech War, they were constructed in conditions where there were literally no civilians to populate them. As canon has it, Minmei was the only civilian in space with the UEEF and she was a stowaway, not an invited guest. The UEEF had lost access to Earth after the 2nd Robotech War, so they would've been building colony ships for an entirely nonexistent population of colonists.

(If we take the Marines book's timeline instead, the hostilities in space broke out before the 2nd Robotech War, so the ships would have never been launched either.)

Of course, all that is assuming the ships were even completed... no source I can find states that they were, only that construction of the ships was halted after the UEEF decided hostilities in space made them unviable for their intended purpose.

(Probably a good reason to use Zentradi ships instead... a lot more dakka.)

eliakon wrote:Tactically speaking you would not want your big guns on a colony ship. You would want your big guns on a battleship where you can bring them to bear on the enemy when you want to use them and not risk losing the fleet core.

You want the colony ship to have some serious defenses because no fleet picket is perfect, and a determined enemy with numbers on their side ("any enemy in Robotech") will eventually break through said picket and be able to attack the colony ship directly.

Having a big, shooty battleship is nice... and having several is nicer still... but you really do want a big freaking gun or something else similarly apocalyptic on the colony ship itself in case the worst happens. "Running away" has an especially poor track record against alien antagonists in Robotech.

(Also, they may be adhering to Zentradi tactical dogma a bit in fleet tactics... making the core of your fleet the shootiest thing you have is something they do as a rule.)

glitterboy2098 wrote:the UEEF originally had a bunch of "Angel class" colony ships, for the trip out to tyrol, but these were effectively unarmed, though they were big, as big as the SDF-1. the angel class was all retired by 2040, due to their vulnerability to the invid and other threats. in prelude it was suggested they could be used for bulk shipping, eventually most of them were turned into the nuetron-S missiles used at reflex point (by loading the warheads the UEEF captured from T.R. Edwards over Optera in 2043)

as for the example on my website:

https://sites.google.com/site/thetemple ... es-freedom

Nicely done, I wonder how many humans/micro zents can be fitted into a converted zent flagship?

Of course the problem is that if we go with the 70,000 numbers some refreence or even a few million, there aren't enough colonists to need a colony ship.
(heck, if you go for the small numbers, the smartest thing to do would have been to grab the factory sat, build up your fleet and then leave earth, for good. The population is too small to defend the world, the world itself has been shattered, and the factory sattelite could let you build long-term colony ships. )

mech798 wrote:Of course the problem is that if we go with the 70,000 numbers some refreence or even a few million, there aren't enough colonists to need a colony ship.

Yeah, it's a bit of a problem like that... or, even if you accept that there are allegedly millions of survivors, by the time they started building those Angel-class ships "after the previous Robotech wars" (emphasis on the plural) there was no longer an accessible civilian population from which potential colonists could be drawn to board those ships.

mech798 wrote:(heck, if you go for the small numbers, the smartest thing to do would have been to grab the factory sat, build up your fleet and then leave earth, for good. The population is too small to defend the world, the world itself has been shattered, and the factory sattelite could let you build long-term colony ships. )

Yep... Earth was not a nice place to live in the aftermath of the First Robotech War, and it hadn't improved all that much prior to the Invid invasion. The environment recovered pretty well thereafter, but the "new management" didn't exactly make it a nice place for settling down. One has to wonder why they bothered staying with all the fallout and so on.

Seto Kaiba wrote:Yep... Earth was not a nice place to live in the aftermath of the First Robotech War, and it hadn't improved all that much prior to the Invid invasion. The environment recovered pretty well thereafter, but the "new management" didn't exactly make it a nice place for settling down. One has to wonder why they bothered staying with all the fallout and so on.

Maybe because the human race in the Rt-verce are a bunch of masocists?

Or scared spitless of what ELSE might be out there. "Better the devil you know..."

Seto wrote:Yeah, it's a bit of a problem like that... or, even if you accept that there are allegedly millions of survivors, by the time they started building those Angel-class ships "after the previous Robotech wars" (emphasis on the plural) there was no longer an accessible civilian population from which potential colonists could be drawn to board those ships.

Unless it was to evacuate the Earth's population if/when opportunity presented itself. We know at by the end of the 2RW Earth could not evacuate w/n the time the Masters gave Leonard (48hrs, which was an extension of the original time), though Leonard seemed to think it could be done in 7 days though he may have just been stalling. To get everyone out in 48hrs I would think would require enough capacity to avoid multiple round trips like 7 days (which IIRC was a minimum). Plus you need some place to take them.

Though it is also possible that those ho stiles they encountered might qualify as a robotech war, though as far as Earth/UEEF was concerned it might not be considered a numbered affair.

taalismn wrote:Or scared spitless of what ELSE might be out there. "Better the devil you know..."

That's true but eventualy the earth would be so irrated from all the wars that the human race would have to leave or die out.

how do you figure that? all the badguys that attack earth use reflex weaponry, and per HG and the RPG, reflex weaponry doesn't result in lingering radiation or fallout.

glitterboy2098 wrote:how do you figure that? all the badguys that attack earth use reflex weaponry, and per HG and the RPG, reflex weaponry doesn't result in lingering radiation or fallout.

... and yet, official material repeatedly mentions widespread radioactive contamination from the bombardment.

Seto Kaiba wrote:

glitterboy2098 wrote:how do you figure that? all the badguys that attack earth use reflex weaponry, and per HG and the RPG, reflex weaponry doesn't result in lingering radiation or fallout.

... and yet, official material repeatedly mentions widespread radioactive contamination from the bombardment.

But is the bombardment the direct source (ie the blasts themselves) or was it secondary effects due to something they hit (like a conventional nuclear plant)?

After all if any of those blasts hit facilities with radioactive material, the blast could contaminate the area and even potentially scatter the material far and wide (Chernobal). There are numerous sites around the world over with radioactive material.

In show dialogue Zor Prime states (or speculate take your pick) that humans have attempted to hide the protoculture with a radioactive substance in "Half Moon". So it may be that in some cases (at least) the radioactive contamination wasn't the result of the RoD, but rather the UEG/UEDF to hide something or to just keep people away from certain areas.

glitterboy2098 wrote:how do you figure that? all the badguys that attack earth use reflex weaponry, and per HG and the RPG, reflex weaponry doesn't result in lingering radiation or fallout.

If you look at the post I replied in which I said the human race are a bunch of masocitsts Seto Kaiba made mention of fallout which is why I said the bit about radiation.