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The SDF-1 Macross , is a fictional interstellar spacecraft from The Super Dimension Fortress Macross (usually just called Macross), an anime series that aired in Japan in 1982-1983, and its American adaptation Robotech (1985). SDF (Super Dimension Fortress) is a reference to the ship being a maneuverable space fortress capable of travelling in different dimensions for faster-than-light movement (Space Folding, in which the ship basically creates a wormhole to move through).
This article deals with the spaceship and its place within the Macross and Robotech storylines. For more general information on those storylines, including more information on the characters, their relations, struggles, and conflicts with each other, see Macross and Robotech.
History and background
Robotech made some considerable alterations to the Macross storyline and this affected the role and purpose of the SDF-1 Macross. To understand the role that it played, the similarities and differences between Robotech and Macross in relation to the spacecraft need explaining.
Similarities
A massive alien spaceship, 3/4 mile long, crashed onto an unsuspecting Earth in the year 1999, on an island in the Pacific Ocean. Inspection of the wreckage showed that the spaceship was manned by giant aliens several times larger than humans and that their technology was centuries and probably millennia beyond Earths.
An international government is established as a result of the spaceships arrival. The crashed ship is rebuilt and a city, called Macross City, grows up around it. In 2009, manned by a completely human crew (the bridge crew consisted of a male captain surrounded by an all female bridge crew), the ship was prepared for its maiden voyage as Earth's defender. A race of giants called the Zentradi suddenly arrive looking for this spacecraft. The spacecraft turns out to be "booby trapped" (preprogrammed to fire its main gun at its enemies when they find the ship). The human crew of the ship are unable to stop it from firing at the Zentradi, forcing the humans to commit to a war with aliens.
After a failed attempt to take off using the gravity control systems, the renovated alien spaceship takes off using its Earth made rocket thrusters and attempts to escape using its space fold capability to escape to the far side of the moon. However, the space fold calculations were off, and the ship overshot its destination and ended up near Pluto's orbit. At the same time, the spacecraft was close enough to Macross City that the entire city was caught in the space-fold bubble and transported to Pluto's orbit also. After the space-fold, the ship's fold drives mysteriously vanish. The ship eventually makes its way from Pluto back to Earth, taking most of a year to do so, pursued by the Zentradi the whole way.
During this pursuit, outnumbered and far from home with few resources, these desperate circumstances force the crew to innovate and improve their technology. The civilians from Macross City (who survived in sealed shelters), were transplanted onto the spacecraft, and the entire city was rebuilt on the ship. The pinpoint barrier system is created from energy remaining from the fold drive. Also during this time, the captain ordered the ship's modular transformation, which transforms the ship from a cruiser to a humanoid form. This reconfiguration allows the main cannon to reach a power supply, as it had been previously linked through the missing fold engines. The First Officer develops the Daedalus maneuver, which allows the giant robot to punch through enemy ships with its attached landing craft by placing the pinpoint barrier around the bow.
When the ship finally reached Earth, it splashed down in the Pacific Ocean. Its stay on the Earth is brief (the Earth government wants to use the ship to lure the Zentradi away from Earth). The civilians were also forced to remain on board since letting them run around freely would damage the credibility of the international government (the government did not tell the public the real reason the ship disappeared for a year, not wanting the public to know they were at war with alien invaders).
When a region in Canada, seceding from the international government, agrees to take the civilians, the new Omni-directional barrier system overloads, while under attack. The energy is released outward, causing a large explosion but leaving the ship intact. This destroys a significant part of the Ontario Quadrant on Earth. The ship and all the civilians on board are sent back into space.
It is during this time that Zentradi deserters begin taking asylum on board the spacecraft and the first Zentradi-human wedding takes place on board. After the bombardment of the Earth by the Zentradi fleet, the spacecraft plays its role in winning the war with the Zentradi by burrowing into the Zentraedi mothership, the latter being much larger than the former, and generating an Omni-directional barrier overload (this time on purpose), which destroys the flagship.
This ends the war and the spacecraft lands on Earth once more, too damaged to rise again. Macross City is then rebuilt outside, surrounding the battered spaceship.
A couple of years later, a disgruntled Zentradi warrior decides to make a final attack on the grounded spaceship as a psychological assult. By this time the spaceship had been sufficiently repaired to lift off again to defend Macross City. It destroys the attacking ship, but not before the disgruntled Zentradi manages to complete a kamikaze run against the spacecraft.
Differences
In Macross, the captain of the ship was Bruno J. Grobal (Henry Gloval in Robotech), First officer Misa Hayase (Lisa Hays in Robotech). Chief Communications Officer: Claudia LaSalle (Glaudia Grant in Robotech). The final three members of the bridge crew (known in the Robotech novels as the "bridge bunnies" and the "terrible trio") were Kim Kabirov, Shammy Milliome (Sammy in Robotech), and Vanessa Laird, though the bridge bunnies did not have these last names in Robotech, only Macross.
In Robotech, the spacecraft was originally the flagship of an alien scientist named Zor, who died right before he sent the spacecraft to Earth. A race of aliens called the "Robotech Masters" wanted Zors ship because it held the last of Zors supply of "Protoculture" (a fuel source Zor cultivated that lead to further development of other technologies that were fundamental to interstellar domination which, in order to maintain them, all depended on the Protoculture fuel source). The Robotech Masters then sent the Zentradi, their army of cloned warriers, to find Zor's ship.
In Macross, the ship was originally a gun destroyer that belonged to a race of aliens called the Supervision Army. After being damaged in a battle against their long-time enemies, the Zentradi, the Supervision Army abandoned the gun destroyer. It wandered through space for some time before reaching Earth. So the motivation for the Zentradi to track the ship to Earth and attack it lies in the fact that the ship belonged to one of their enemies. When the gun destroyer automatically fired upon the Zentradi, Captain Global, in both Macross and Robotech, immediately catches on to the "booby trap". But only in the Macross version does he compare this tactic to WW2, when the Germans would plant bombs in ships they were forced to abandon.
Though the term "Protoculture" does exist in the Macross version, it actually referes to something completely different from the Robotech "protoculture" and had very little to do with the Supervision Army gun destroyer other than the fact that the Zentradi believed that the humans aboard were the last renmants of an ancient intersteller civilization called "protoculture."
In the Macross series, Earth originally named the spaceship ASS-1, which stands for Alien Space Ship. In the novel rendition of the Robotech storyline by Jack McKinney, Earth originally named the spaceship The Visitor.
In the Macross version, the arrival of ASS-1 provoked the "United Nation Wars", since the alien spaceship motivated a movement to unite Earth under a UN controlled military government. This war was bloody and lasted throughout most of the first decade of the new millenium. In the course of that decade, ASS-1 was rebuilt on the island where it crashed and renamed SDF-1 Macross (a term coined from Macro to imply its massive size). (Note: English-speaking fans have extrapolated that the "-ss" suffix stands for space ship, but this is not an official explanation from the Japanese creators. The "-ss" originated from "-su" in the Japanese pronunciation (makurosu), which in turn was derived from the Japanese pronunciation of Macbeth ("makubesu"), a pre-production name that the main production sponsor initially wanted.).
In the Robotech version, there was already a massive bloody "global civil war" going on throughout the 1990's when "the visitor" first arrived in 1999. "The Visitor" motivated several of the warring factions to put their differences aside to create the "United Earth Defense Council", which served as the head of a global military government. After the creation of the UEDC, there were a few minor skirmishes with dissenting nations, but it was not on the scale of the "global civil war" that came before it, nor was it on the scale of the "Unification Wars" in the Macross version. After dealing with those minor skirmishes, work proceded to rebuild "the visitor" which was eventually renamed not Macross but simply SDF-1. In Robotech, Macross was the name of the island in the South Pacific that the spaceship crashed on, not the name of the ship. In the Macross version, the island was called South Ataria Island.
The ensuing war between the Earth forces and the Zentradi would be retrospectively labeled Space War I in Macross. In Robotech, it would be retrospectively labeled The First Robotech War.
In Robotech, after the kamikaze run by the disgruntled Zentradi (named Khyron in Robotech), the SDF-1 is destroyed beyond repair. Captain Global, the Bridge Bunnies, and Claudia Grant perished in the attack, but Lisa Hayes was ejected in a escape pod at the last possible moment by the Captain himself, and survived. Macross city becomes too radioactive to be habbitable, and is thus abandoned. The SDF-1's radioactive hulk is buried under a gigantic earthen mound and the city surrounding it is completely leveled. The SDF-2 Odyssey, which is SDF-1's sister ship, is also destroyed when Khyron attacks her in orbit with his ship's Reflex Cannon. Odyssey was to be Lisa Hayes's command.
The storyline of Robotech remained pretty consistent with Macross up to this point, with the exception of points already highlighted here and maybe a few other small details. But from here on, Robotech goes its own separate way, using anime footage from other Japanese series whos storylines have nothing to do with Macross.
The disgruntled Zentradi in Macross is named Kamujin. His kamikaze doesn't completely destroy the Macross but does grievously damage it, which includes the loss of its main cannon and the Daedalus landing craft. The ship is repaired and refit, and it returns to service. The missing Daedalus and remaining Prometheus carrier are replaced by a pair of ARMD class carriers. The bridge crew also survives almost unscratched and Macross city remains a thriving city.
The SDF design inspired a second battleship, entirely human designed and built. The SDF-2 Megalord was being constructed at the Apollo Base on the Moon since November 2003, but it was only partly completed when work stopped during Space War I. However, after the end of the war, the ship underwent a massive redesign and became the colony ship SDF-2 Megaroad-01, the flagship of the fisrt long-distance colonization fleet. It was launched on September 2012, under the command of Captain Misa Hayase (Ichijyo) and hosting the famous Skull Squadron.
(It is interesting to note that originally, the launch of the Megaroad was to be portrayed in the final chapter of the original Japanese Macross television series, and character and mechanical designers Haruhiko Mikimoto and Kazutaka Miyatake even made designs for the event. However, this was scrapped, and the designs were left unused.
The original design of this ship is very different from the one showed in Macross Flash Back 2012 four years later. It's a military ship, and included the bow similar to the original Macross that was altered to house the colony section of the ship in the later design. One could say the final design is a bigger and better non-transformable Macross with a new bridge section).
The Megaroad class colony ships were eventually replaced by the New Macross Class, composed of a "Battle" section somewhat resembling the SDF-1 and a much larger "City" section, housing a city in a clamshell armored pod.
Features
The SDF-1 Macross has numerous notable features including:
- Gravity control system (although the system burst through the ship in Episode 2, the system was restored later on, and as of March 2040 they suffered no further problems)
- Space-fold Drive - allows faster than light travel (the original, repaired Supervision Army drives vanished in episode 3, taking with it energy conducts that fed the main cannon)
- Macross City - a complete city built within the ship to shelter and bring normality to the lives of over 50,000 civilians within. It also inadvertently provided an invaluable psychological advantage against the Zentradi, who were profoundly confused by civilian society.
- Modular transformation - The main gun was connected to its energy source through the fold drive, which was now missing. Lacking any spare conduit, the engineers realized they could reconfigur the modular blocks that formed the ship so the main gun could be connected to another energy hub. This was called the modular transformation, which changed the shape of the ship into a configuration resembling a humanoid shape. The ship did not stay in this configuration at all times and would often be configured back into its "crusier" mode. Unfortunately, these transformations were the cause of much destruction and many casualties within the city (first seen in Episode 5) until the city buildings were arranged to accommodate the ship's two configurations.
- 1 semi-submersible aircraft carrier + 1 semi-submersible assault landing vehicle - the Prometheus and Daedalus carriers, also taken in the space fold mishap, are docked onto the ship. Their semi-submersible nature allowed them to operate in space normally. When the SDF-1 Macross is in its humanoid configuration, the Daedalus and Prometheus become the arms.
- Daedalus maneuver - Misa Hayase develops the idea of using the pinpoint barrier with the Daedalus to punch through Zentraedi ships and attack from the inside by positioning destroids behind the front loading ramp, and opening it once inside an enemy ship. The destroids then fire a volley of missiles before the carrier is removed. (docked in Episode 4; Daedalus Maneuver first seen in Episode 5)
Armament
- Main cannon - a "super dimension energy" cannon capable of taking out multiple large Zentradi spacecraft in a single shot. It cannot be fired often because it drains the Macross of its energy. (The main cannon is called the Reflex Cannon in Robotech)
- 4 1780mm rail cannons
Defenses
- Pinpoint barrier - Developed in Episode 6, these were three small engergy disks made from the energy residue left behind by the missing spacefold drive. Three crew members control these three disks with trackballs to move across the ships surfice to intercept enemy fire. They were not always successful in catching an enemy missile before it hit the ship. If necessary, they can position together for maximum protection against a particularly powerful attack. During the Daedalus maneuver, all three disks are concentrated at the front of the Daedalus, preventing the seaship from getting damaged when it punches through enemy ships.
- Omni-directional barrier - an energy sphere that envelopes the whole ship. Though it was meant to replace the primitive pinpoint barrier system, this barrier overloads under too much stress (introduced in Episode 19; overload in Episodes 19 and 27).
Aircraft and mecha complement
External links
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