Grrl Power #655 – The Robotech
Given how powerful those orbs are, the screw ship aliens might actually have good cause to attack Sydney. Imagine them in the hands of someone who was out to actually cause a bunch of mayhem. And presumably had 4 or more hands.
For those of you unaware of Sydney’s reference, there was an amazing show called Robotech, which more or less introduced me to proper anime. I had seen G-Force and Speed Racer and Voltron, but that stuff was much more childish. Robotech had a serialized story, dialog spoken at a regular human pace *coughspeedracercough* and amazing music to boot. Hearing the opening theme to this day show gives me a serious nostalgia boner. Some of you will know it as Macross. Robotech was apparently three different anime series bought by Harmony Gold and then translated and dubbed to make them all one long story. Purists of course hate this but I didn’t know any better when I watched it and I thought it was incredible.
ANYWAY. One of the things Robotech was famous for, especially the first season (Macross) was these panoramic shots of distant explosions ripping across the sky, just like Sydney has managed to pull off here. Hence the reference. The last time I checked, Robotech was available on Netflix, and is worth checking out if you’ve never seen it. Imagine that you’re 12 and this is the first thing like it you’ve ever seen. It was pretty damned amazing.
A lot of people have questions about the physics behind Sydney’s flight capabilities. The short version is that she’s currently limited to Mach 4, which granted in most cases is like being limited to only having $4 million dollars in your bank account, but an important factor is that she is immune to gravity while using it, so things like escape velocity aren’t a factor for her. She can just fly straight up and doesn’t have to worry about slingshotting around stuff.
I say “immune to gravity” but of course, she’s only tested it out against 1G. (We can assume the Alari homeworld is within 10% of Earth’s gravity.) If I were her, I wouldn’t go buzzing any neutron stars quite yet.
Thinking about that more, I had originally thought that her speed was fixed once she tops out at mach 4, and it’ll definitely stay that way in the atmosphere, (unless she buys a speed upgrade, obviously) but in space… maybe it makes sense that she can accelerate indefinitely. 1G of acceleration is pretty fast, according to some math I found after a quick google, you could get to the moon in like 3.5 hours, half of it spent accelerating, and half spent decelerating. With 4 dots filled in on her flight tree, I’d actually give her 16Gs of acceleration, which would almost be like that scene in Futureama where Leela flies to the moon before Fry can finish counting down from 10. Ok, not actually that fast, but still pretty god damned fast. It makes me appreciate those Honor Harrington books with ships that could accelerate at 450-500 gravities.
Max never tested Sydney’s Extrosphere flight capabilities. That’s a word, right? It should be. Anyway, maybe Sydney’s speed does work like that, in which case it would probably make more sense for her to Mach 4 straight up till she hits space, then G-boost across and back down, if she ever has to make a cross country trip. Even with that kind of speed, I think the previous page holds up. Sydney wasn’t headed toward the moon long enough to close appreciable distance to it.
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Also a thought as to Sydney getting rescued,
Dabbler should have a memory of the Blood magic circle used to open the portal in her cybernetic eye. They should be able to find the dimensional Brane Ripper in the rubble of the mountain. And they have various magic users both in the Twilight Council and at ARCON. most useful will most likely be Krona as she should be able to duplicate the portal easiest and fastest.
Most likely Maxima, Dabbler, and Krona will arrive just after Sydney has eliminated the galactic threat.
more likly the aliens are getting saved from the wrath of sydney :D
But you have to get the blood to power it, right? Odds are good that Sciona’s stockpiles were spent or destroyed by this operation, since the lair collapsed. So there’s no morally sound way to provide that mych blood, unless that guy who has the ppwer to refill liquids could handle such a bvolume.
Blood bank
What about the guy on the twilight council that can refill any liquid? He is specifically being used by vampires to generate blood for feeding.
He has a limit on how much he can do at once.
And like that my admiration for Sydney/Halo has gone up higher.
…And respect. As mere mortal humans, you & I gotta respect a firepower like that…Definitely. The kind of respect that translates as “please don’t atomize me.”
0.o
Que the fighters having powerful deflector shields cause its unlikely to be that easy.
Yes, because we shouldn’t forget that these are the guys/gals who wiped out the Alari, who were pretty powerful if Sciona’s anything to go by
Couple of notes – for the people calling that a Macross Missile Massacre or Roboteching; those are typically for when someone’s *firing* a lot of missiles (or, in the latter case, a bunch of projectiles fired in anything other than the direction the attacker is flying in). Sydney is using a laser fired ahead of her, so doesn’t match either trope, what with the distinct lack of her firing any missiles or other projectiles.
Secondly; do not be surprised if some salty BattleTech fans get annoyed at this – Harmony Gold’s been full-on copyright trolls with a bunch of designs from Macross that FASA also licensed for BattleTech. And still doing it despite there being pretty strong evidence that the company HG bought the rights from in the first place never actually *had* the rights in the first place. The reason Harebrained Schemes’ BattleTech lacks classics like the Warhammer and Marauder despite them being in MechWarrior Online? Harmony Gold filing a copyright infringement claim on both games. Just; look up the “Unseen” on the Sarna Wiki to see some of what the deal there is.
Kind of why I would call it the Xellos attack from Slayers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huiv0IAAj-s
he destroyed an entire army of dragons when they were still on the horizon
with a wave of his hand
Pretty much any of the various Macross series has at least one of these types of shots. (“Listen to my song!). And Xellos Attack actually has a pretty nice ring to it. +1
This same shot shows up in Gundam, Legend of Galactic Hero… if there’s a firefight in space or a full on fleet battle, you’re going to see this
Not sure if either Crest of the Stars or Banner of the Stars did this, but I can’t imagine they didn’t at least once.
Battleship Yamato – Wave Motion Gun (“We’ve lost the third bridge… again!)
Dangaio – The Psychic Wave Attack, hilariously misspelled in its first subtitle as the Side-Kick Wave. (“Justice League, you must use your sidekick wave!” “Teen Titans, GO!”)
Macross SDF1 – Reflex Cannon (also called, creatively, “The Main Gun!”)
Ah, fun with google…
Thankfully, copyright judges would laugh this out of court. There aren’t enough similarities in any of this to the original Robotech/Macross anime/manga to be considered infringement. At most, it’s an homage level of reference, which falls under Fair Use, which has solidly established legal predecent in previous court cases.
(Thanks to social media, if they tried to pull a dick move like that, we’d rip ’em to shrieds, too.)
Dude, that lawsuit got dismissed with prejudice two months ago. A letter from Big West (the Japanese company that actually owns Macross and the other shows Robotech is based) to Harmony Gold was found in discovery that stated that HG did not have copyright on any of the mecha images from the shows.
Moreover, they weren’t suing over new, original artwork that had been created in-house to replace the artwork of mechs that had originally come from Macross. Before the case actually went to trial, they agree to drop it and because it was dismissed with prejudice, HG cannot bring another suit up against it again.
And beside that, Harmony Gold only has the license until 2020 anyway, and given their rather hostile relationship with Big West at this point, it seems unlikely that they’ll get a renewal.
Not trying to downplay what you’re saying, but maybe you should rethink before throwing hate at Harmony Gold or the original makers of Macross before saying things like this. Whether or not they copyrighted an explosion style means nothing. The method of delivery also applies to Sydney’s circumstance because the same explosion style was reproduced via the use of the reflex cannons which were gigantic single fire lasers capable of destroying many small targets and even ripping through much larger ones.
As far as who came first, Macross pre-dates Classic battletech boardgames by 2 years. And Macross is far more mainstream than Battletech, for ease of reference, something that more heavily benefits a webcomic. But in ANY case, getting salty over the semantics of a cool explosion is just pointless :p
Macross might predate Battletech, but the claim that it’s more mainstream just hasn’t been true since the mid 90s. Harmony Gold has done little with the franchise. Battletech has had multiple top-rated video games, a CCG that outsold Magic for about a year, a wildly successful clicky game, a highly popular novel line, and, of course, the board game that’s been in continual production and growth since 1984. In the same amount of time, Robotech has had a comic book that sold poorly and was canceled after a few issues, an attempt at a new series that never went anywhere, a single video game that was an utter flop, a tabletop game that failed to deliver all its Kickstarter rewards before it was killed, and a live action movie that has remained in negotiations so long that the actors originally tapped to star in it have since retired.
“…so doesn’t match either trope, what with the distinct lack of her firing any missiles or other projectiles.”
What? In panel 5 you don’t see those arcing blasts coming into the right side of the ship? It looks to me like Sydney first fired off a swarm of blasts that are mimicing the behavior of “missles tracking to target,” even as she’s blasting away with her main weapon.
Those just look like enemy ships that’ve already been cut in two by the beam, she’s mid-traverse with it and those are the first few ships caught by it.
Those of us who have abandoned Robotech for the true meaning of Macross know it by it’s proper name:
the ITANO CIRCUS. :D
…+1…
Whatever the name, it’s still awesome to behold. Prefer the Manticore Missile Massacre since they were up to hundreds of thousands at a go.
…but only when not Apollo-capable.
…the word is “Lady Harrington, and No Mercy!” 19 Thousand missiles into the Peep taskforce’s face- six destroyers out of @ 50 ships jumped out…
don’t forget the Battle of Manticore. That was…what a quarter million missiles total missiles thrown by both sides?
The Geek in me requires me to mention that it is actually “Battle of the Planets”, not G-Force. …but yeah, me too, LOVED that show!!!
They’re.. robots! Yeah, those are robots the Gatchaman are destroying.
Not alien invaders, not traitors to planet earth, and most certainly not people…
“Sandy Frank, Sandy Frank, wants to crap in his hands!”
Jun the Swan is one of the first examples in anime of the “If it’s cute and pink, fear it” rule.
Someone mentioned spacing.
Shouldn’t it be hard to hit tiny targets miles away?
In panel 5 it looks more like her continous blast ray she was using at the target demonstration during the press conference. She seems to draw it from the right to the left without stopping. Depending on the speed of that ray (lightspeed like a laser or just fast like a plasma ray) these fighters have no to little chance to dodge that and even then there is a big spaceship behind them that would get the blast.
If firing single bullets, yes, if shooting water out of a hose, no. Sydney’s beam is continuous like a water hose, and is sweeping across a crowded field. She may not be hitting all the fighters she’s aiming at, but she’s hitting enough.
Was going to mention the distance traveled as well, a hose is a good analogy – note the slight arc to the beam/plasma/whatever between her and the ships.
Also, a laser weapon (light-speed) would have no distinguishable curve at this distance, so the PPO’s Like Butta Ray is most likely not light-based.
Think of it as a fairly narrow cone effect with the visible beam being the tracer. Given the distance the effect has to travel, it can spread out pretty widely (it also gives an indication of just how much energy to which Sydney has access).
That much force is nevertheless going to wreak havoc with weapons and power supply systems if applied over the full surface of the craft.
It also looks like a case of ‘energy bleed’ from the primary beam that is still immensely destructive.
Similar to the effect in Robotech where the primary cannon beam hits one ship dead center and it blows straight thru, while another ship maybe 3-4 ship widths to the side of the beam gets peeled effortlessly and explodes.
You also have the ships themselves causing explosive collateral damage by being too close to one another.
From Dave’s blog, it appears his intention is that the flight orb provides some form of localized gravity effects, which many have guessed at based on previous info. Some thoughts on this:
1. The gravity only appears to affect Sydney. People and objects she carries with her don’t appear to be affected by the gravity since they typically sit on the shield instead of floating. This means her body weight would severely limit her lifting capacity:
(Max acceleration of orb)x(sydney’s body weight)=(acceleration she is fighting against [e.g. earth’s gravity])x(sydney’s body weight + max lifting capacity)
So if the orb provides 2gs of acceleration, she could lift her body weight. 16gs, 15 times her body weight. Considering how small she is, that probably won’t work out to much.
2. Her max speed in atmosphere is also governed by her body weight. The heavier she is, the more force is required to slow her down, the higher her terminal velocity. If what she is wearing is also affected by the gravity, it might be worth it for her to have access to a 200lb diver’s belt or something.
3. As dave’s blog suggested, a constant acceleration would actually make her a pretty kickass space flight vehicle. With no fuel weight, she could achieve some truly astonishing speeds. Modern ion drives provide a constant, very small acceleration (much smaller than the flight orb), and they are one of the fastest options for distance flights. Furthermore, similar technology to the flight orb is what is required for an Alcubierre drive… come to think of it, it’s not clear that this ISN’T the propulsion method of the flight orb.
Localized gravity/inertia cancellation as needed in each of the orbs also answers the question “Why Does Sydney still have her arms after firing off her pew-pew orb?” nicely as well… :D
Has anyone remembered that Sydney recently found out she can send out her holo form somewhere and then teleport to that spot? Depends on range she can send it but it might allow her to jump long distances faster than flying. If she can focus it on a person, she might send it to maxima or dabbler or harem.
LightBee still has to physically travel to its destination, and Sydney can only sense a general “is there something in the way” and has to stop and deploy HoloHalo every now and then to get her bearings (she lost her marbles years ago)
I wonder if Sydney is still in the orbit. Otherwise she must be falling down which must be pretty much like a rollercoaster for her, when the gravity kicks in after her letting go of the flight orb…
shes far enough away form the planet that free fall would feel like nothing at all. it would take a close to a day or more to fall form where she is and with no atmosphere it would feel more like flouting then falling.
To quote XKCD: “Space isn’t high, it’s fast”. Halo’s top speed is only four times the speed of sound; to get into orbit, you need to be going about six times faster.
Man, Robotech/SDF Macross is still one of my favorite franchises, admittedly some parts way more than others.
At a guesstimate, without air resistence, assuming her flight orb works like an engine with a variable amount of thrust, the gee force needed to sustain 4x the speed of sound moderately low heights as per the test flight, would be pretty high.A fighter jet typically has a good 1.1 to 1.3 gees of actual trust, but relies on wings to provide lift and has a very small cross section for its size worth of air resistence. So sydney, being much smaller in a not-that-aerodynamic spherical or ovid shield bubble, probably has a ton of air resistence and no lifting force to help her, probably has much higher G force. Outside of the atmosphere, she would probably be pretty fast, and could probably reach the moon in under a day, then shoot pass it like an idiot because she wouldnt know that she needed to turn around and decellerate.
One thing she would definately not do is still be anywhere close to the ship unless it was following her, because she is at least going fast and high enough to be orbital based on the curvature of the planet. A low earth orbit means you are moving very fast. If she was now going about ISS speeds, thats 7.5km per second, so assume its been at least two minutes and she could well be 900km away…
I’m not really sure how powerful the flight orb would have to be to achieve Mach 4 in atmosphere, but I would guess that it would need to be pretty powerful. A skydiver in free fall hits terminal velocity at about 200 mph. Presumably the sheild is a bit more aerodynamic, but it can’t be that much better. I believe wind resistance increases as the square of speed. So even if she could free fall at 400mph with the sheild (seems high) she would need 36 times as much force to hit Mach 4! (400×6=2400 mph=~Mach 4. 6^2=36). Meaning she would need 36gs of acceleration. Fighters don’t need anywhere near this much because they are far more aerodynamic and they’re force isn’t based on their weight.
One last note on her atmospheric speed. Since her speed is so severely impacted by wind resistance, it would definitely be better for her to fly higher. Even the relatively short journey 20 miles up would likely give her a huge speed increase.
One detail ya missed. The shield has been shown to alter it’s shape to a more aerodynamic, almost bullet shape when she was testing her speed with Maxima.
well it does turn into something more oval for lower drag, but its still not a shape that would give any lift. She also weighs nothing yet is pushing a huge volume of air around her. At mach 4 the cone on Sydney would be much greater than a jet, which typically do not cruise at mach 4 at those low altitudes…
So, yeah, maybe a good 10 gees of force needed? Hard to say, but she could probably make the trip to Mars with her accel in something like a week or less, only limit would be supplies other than air…
Isn’t Sydney using three orbs at the same time here? The flying one, the force field and the laser?
Wasn’t she limited to 2?
More precisely, the flying one does not appear in the page at all, and she does seem to be flying.
This seems to be an artist mistake, as the PPO is orbiting her in panel 5, despite it being used at the same time.
Indeed.
Panel One shows the Forcefield orb in her left hand and the right hand is not shown at all, with the Pew-Pew Orb clearly circling her head.
Panel Three shows the Pew-Pew Orb in her right hand, the Forcefield orb in her left, and a duplicate Pew-Pew Orb circling her head.
Explanation – she swapped out the Flight orb with the Pew-Pew Orb and is still moving due to inertia. The Artist™ forgot to swap out the colors on the switched out orb above her head.
Nice eye.
Here’s an even nicer eye…
Sydney isn’t using the flight orb because it appears she’s still in space…
And for something more scary…
She just opened a hole in her shield to use the PPO…
In Space.
Can you say explosive decompression?
i think the circle is more of a targeting reticule (and some other commenters agree with me from the looks of page 1)
look at the beam it starts from a distance away from sydney(from what i assume is the shields edge)
also remember in the carpark fight when syd summoned the lighthook and it appeared outside the shield ? i think the same priceple applies here the opening for the ppo appears outside the shield (i wonder if the diameter of the circle reflects the max diameter of the beam)
… Meanwhile back on earth – I could see Max striking a deal with Deus to hire Opal to assist in the rescue attempt. Between her, Dabbler, possibly Krona + retrieving the ripper sword, the attempt should look spectacular – and would give a reason to use the lightbee ‘port mode if the rescue portal turns out too small for Sydney otherwise…
No doubt she will still get in trouble for not trying to avoid a confrontation with the intergalactic space police :P
I love the up-drawing to indicate note change on the sound effects for the music.
Sydney, no! Never use any attack that obscures your view of the target! Once the light show ends, you’ll just find out you put all your resources into something that just got shrugged off!
That’s only applicable to single targets, generally of equal or superior power levels. Mooks get no such considerations.
“Mooks are there to die creatively. Mooks are there to show the Audience how cool the Lead is…”
Hong Kong Action Theatre, the RPG
Or this could go into Pratchettian territory “the only thing that could survive [that fall] was a corpse”.
Even if what we see is ablative armour, after that layer is stripped, it’s full on game there with the plasmahose.
I wonder what powers those orbs, they drain energy from the nearest star?
well… couple ideas myself.
we know that portals exist, and dimensions (from dabbler)
So how about two portals connected to two different dimensions that react like matter and anti matter. a few injection modules and another portal to a ‘waste dimension’ I’d toss it all in a pocket dimension, because it it blows I don’t wanna be anywhere near it.
Would probably not want to use the angels or demons ones thou – they might get a bit peeved in using up their home turf.
“dude! there are a few entities at the door who want a few words with you….”
um, dude, the door appears to be an entity as well…
I could be wrong but I believe the word you’re looking for is “extra-atmospheric”
Sydney is taking a big risk here. First, her PPO isn’t THAT powerful – Sciona’s construct had no problem putting up a shield that protected it, and now she’s fighting the things that crushed Sciona’s peope on their own homeworld!
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/2459
Secondly, the Mega-Mecha-Cthulhu that nearly got through her shield wioth a single shot was basically dropped from orbit, or even shot downwards from orbit – and it was completely UNHARMED!
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/2890
So, call me pessimistic, but I wonder just how much (or how little!) damage Halo can do to those fighters before they all hit her shield with a dozen times more firepower than is needed to wipe it and our heroine herself from existence.
Of course we know she’ll survive and get back to Earth, but it seems unlikely she’ll do it by defeating this opponent on her own.
Sciona’s bot blocked the rapid-fire gatling mode, where it appeared that each shot was less powerful than the beam but made up for it in quantity. Sydney is firing the beam here, which appears to be much more powerful.
True, but Sydney seemed to think she couldn’t do anything to harm it.
Quite the opposite, actually. Sydney reported in after accidentally starting a forest fire, and indicated that she thought she should be trying to blow the bot up, and was told not to because the chance for collateral damage from her beam was too great.
Having reread the relevant episodes, it seems like Sydney tried the scattershot option, found it didn’t get through and stopped firing at it. Then she was contacted by Peggy in the Osprey and asked if she should try to destroy the bot and was told not to. (Probably for the best; if the beam attack really is that much mote powerful, she would have burned doen the whole place…) So, it’s actually not as clear as I thought it was. Now I’m really curious what the effect of her Robotech attack will be. Though the last panel of today’s episode almost screams ‘clifhanger!’ to me.
Sydney has never used the full power of the ppo because she was afraid of hurting people. remember back to when she used it on the tank and she told max it felt like she was touching a sun. this is the first time she is in a place that has a no one to worry about hurting no matter how far the hoot can go.
i expect there not to much left of these aliens when Sydney is done with them.
Uh, yeah, panel 5 definitely seems to have the PPO in orbit around her head, along with the one remaining unknown, lighthook, lightbee/truesight, and air refreshener orbs. The PPO (or at least the far left orb in panel 5) needs to be shaded blue to be the flight orb, since purple (force field) needs to stay in her hand for obvious anti-implode-y reasons.
Dave…feel good about this, okay? Seriously.
We comment on things like this because we know you want to get the art right. We care about this story and want to help you polish it to its absolute best.
We do not in any way *smacks with a whiffle bat anyone who disagrees* mean to make you feel bad about your artistic or coloration skills, etc, etc, ad nauseam *WHAPWHAPWHAP shhhhaddup!!* because these little snaffu things happen to ALL writers & artists, and even get past the most competent of editorial staff from time to time…but hey, you got hundreds of us helping you to be that much more awesome, yaaaaay!
*waves manged whiffle bat like one of those #1 foam finger hand thingies, cheering*
LOL. This.
Totally this. ::points up with a front hoof::
Eight legs up … oops! (thud)
And now I’ll always picture you like this. :)
Agree as well, the art and in-universe rules in this comic are amazingly consistent, the occasional minor art mixup is long overdue. Unless of course it’s not a mistake at all, and we’re learning something about the skill tree cross-link between the 2 orbs in question (as already mentioned).
Hmf, it’s “Macross Missile Massacre”. Bloody Robotech fans and damn the bastard Harmony Gold who butchered good series to make that horrible amalgam. =)
Dave’s right, that show rocked.
Think of the beam like Valefor’s upgraded ability in Final Fantasy X.
Welp! I predict sidney might need some serious therapy after coming back to earth once she realizes she probably committed mass slaughter(albeit in more than likely self defense). Even if she doesn’t see any bodies, once her stress comes down, she is is open minded enough to realize she will have snuffed out a lot of living being. I wonder if dave is going to touch the topic of ptsd in this comic, even if its a little. After all, it is still a light hearted comic.
until/unless she gets shown that she was actually destroying ultra fancy drones, or she was inside Scicho’s head, destroying mental constructs based upon the most feared, most pessimistic predictions of our least favorite bloodmage. remember Harem’s disorientation, and her explanation of the same? there was more of her. actually, now that i think about it a little more, that might even be indicative of a bit of timey-whimey shenanigans. in any event, the resulting mental trauma wouldn’t really apply, until she realized that under similar circumstances, she could and would go all bond villain if she had to. or remembering that she LIKED how it felt. or any of a hundred other things.
TL;DR: Syd will be fine, unless she isn’t. nothing a long talk with Max won’t fix.
*Futurama Dave.
How’d you misspell that?
While driving to my parents’ place for the long weekend we are having here in Ontario, I was thinking of what ringtones people in GrrlPower might have for each other. Ones that have been demonstrated already:
Arianna: Max – Imperial March from Star Wars
Sydney: Joel (maybe general) – My Little Pony theme song
Max: Sydney – They’re Coming to Take Me Away
My proposals:
Achilles: Sydney – Look What’s Happened to Me (Greatest American Hero theme song) – He remembers the late 1970’s well.
Anvil: Sydney – Maniac (Flashdance song)
Arianna: Sydney – Space Cadet
Leon: Sydney – Star Trekkin’
Sydney: Anvil – Sixteen Tons
Sydney: Dabbler – She Blinded Me with Science
Sydney: Hiro – I’m Holding Out for a Hero
Sydney: Harem: Marooned Without You (Theme to Joe vs. the Volcano) – Meg Ryan plays 3 sisters at different times in the film.
I love your choices.
Did Sydney just use the big mothership as the backstop for her PPO beam? Because if so, she’s taking Max’s advice to heart.
(I can’t tell because the over-shoulder perspective means that maybe the beam’s firing over the top of the ship, maybe?)
Quick point out. Sydney is holding the PPO and Shield orbs yet the PPO is above her head instead of flight.
All this love for Robotech, but barely a mention of the poor fighter swarm being blown out of existence.
At least now we know who she’s up against. :D
So to dig into specifics, the ‘Launch Fighters’ onomatopoeia is unmistakably pulled from an old PC game called ‘Star Control’. It was one of the key abilities of the Ur-Quan Dreadnought – its other was a tremendously powerful plasma bolt.
Other than that, the mothership in no way resembles an Ur-Quan dreadnaught beyond this launch sequence.
“Mach 4 straight up till she hits space, then G-boost across and back down…”
Especially effective if she’s heading west; at that altitude she’ll have the planet’s rotation working in her favor.
then some wher ein distance dabbler and ones she called favor for see the huge blast in distance captain goe s “WTF” ” yepp that’s her” xD
YES!!! Robotech FTW!!!!
One ridiculously over powered ‘ship’ vs an alien armada…
Someone make a ‘The Last Starfighter’ reference.
oh.
my.
GOD! /joeystyles
with that last upgrade Sydney would be able to do a full on Death Blossom at will!
or, at least, as long as her inner ears allowed her to. i don’t even wanna think about what kind of mess zero-g omnidirectional vomit streams could make.
I was going to say, “except the flight orb gives her self-referential gravity” except she’s not holding it when she’s using the shield orb and the PPO, so…yeah. Yeah…. But the question is, do you spew mid-death-blossom? Or does the spewing come afterward? ‘Cause by then she could have the flight orb in hand…except she’ll probably need to PPO a bit more, so…
…Yeah. Not so good.
Glad she hasn’t thought of it just now…although it’s probable she hasn’t eaten anything in a longish while, so there’s a chance there wouldn’t be much of anything to deal with… but still, probably just as well she’s not doing a death blossom.
Got confused by the Valkyrie’s death in “Battle Beyond the Stars”
Of course, the ‘infinite acceleration’ idea depends on Sydney’s flight orb actually generating thrust. Not necessarily a given. The way that the orb essentially ignores gravity I would argue that the movement of the orb doesn’t depend on any kind of thrust as we understand it. Because I’m not all that sure that the orb respects inertia, either, based on my fuzzy recollection of how she flies throughout the series.
It could be something as freakily exotic as the orb moving the universe around it. Or some form of telekinetic flight that likewise breaks the rules of gravity and inertia.
That shot was from a single reactor ignition, right?
As a a fan of MechWarrior, which is basically the Americanised version of Robotech, I can ALSO get on board with the Harmony God hate train. Also, thanks for mentioning Honor Herrington. Now I gotta go reread the entire series again…
So next up we will either see a bunch of ET’s running for the boxes of brown light bulbs as Sydney does the bull in china shop impersonation….
Or The Mighty Halo doing a tactical retreat with many creative expletives about nerfs being needed when the ET’s finish warming up the capital class ship weapons and the fighters scatter or at least try to scatter to clear the line of fire.
Either way… We win?
Robotech just ripped all its imagery from Macross anyway! (yes yes, bought the rights, whatever. Hush.)
…What? Just saying, if you’re going to watch a thing you should see its original form, not one that worked by pasting together conent from other shows.
IT WAS OUR CHILDHOOD, OK? We were ignorant! We know now that it was bastardized, eviscerated, dubbed to death, and set to a cheap, crappy soundtrack, but we were kids, and it wormed our way into our souls. Don’t judge my heart!!
Pay no attention to the fact that I used to watch Ronin Warriors without having any idea that it was actually Yoroiden Samurai Troopers, and a few other similar such things.
In case someone hasn’t said it already, i think the term you want is “Exo-atmospheric”.
About dang time Sydney stopped running and attacked, given that they were easy to destroy I think my assumption still fits. That they have immense attack power but weak paper thin defenses.