[4Tran]

Originally Posted by Ithekro

We know a full shield overloading on the SDF-1 can wipe out an entire city if I remember correctly. However was that all the energy they were absorbing being reflected all at once, or was that a power grid overload more or less coverting matter in the surrounding area to energy? They did it twice that I recall. Once when they tried it the first time (they didn't mean for that to happen), and the second time on purpose.

That overload only happened the one time; they fixed the pinpoint barrier system after that, and I can't recall it happening in any subsequent Macross show. While the explosion was huge, it wasn't anywhere big enough to have converted matter to energy. A single kilogram of matter converted to energy would generate 9E16 J, or 21 megatons, any practical amount of matter conversion (the ground being the closest source of matter to SDF-1) would have to involve hundreds of tons, and so the energy output would have been in the hundreds of gigatons or several teraton range. The explosion that engulfed that city in Canada wasn't anywhere near that kind of size - it should have been in the hundreds of megatons to several gigaton range (it's possible that it's a bit more than that). This is a figure that's fairly consistent with the amount of firepower being poured onto Macross, so it should be just as the crew described it - an overload of the shield system.

The explosion that took out most of Zentradi fleet should mostly be caused by secondary explosions from the destruction of Boldolze's mothership, so the pinpoint barrier doesn't have much of a role to play here (except to protect Macross, of course ).


Oh, and I forgot to address these points earlier:

Originally Posted by Tak

The first enemies encountered by humanity were the Zentradi, and although the first fleet was scattered (but not completely beaten), there are still 2,000 such fleets lurking around the galaxy. Had the Zents not been busy pursuing their more dreaded enemies, humanity would have been crushed, easily. After all, while humanity have achieved in building colonies 1/3 the size of the moon, they are still facing enemies who can construct battle-stations the size of a friggin planet.

Actually, I was speaking of the Factory Satellite when I was referring to pinnacles of engineering. As far as I can tell, humans haven't built anything to that kind of scale yet. Still, the sheer number and size of ships they have built is extremely impressive given that they had to build the infrastructure for it almost from scratch; and they accomplished it in just a few decades.

Originally Posted by Tak

Old Gundam might have done it back in the 70s heyday, but it does less and less now to the point where a detailed explanation is a lost art. By the time of SEED, there were very little of such explanation left to pass around.

They seem to be trying to recapture a lot of that kind of explanation again with Gundam 00, but it seems that they're just tossing around the word "quantum" and "GN" a lot. As actual explanations (or at least reasonable facsimilies thereof), they are very unimpressive.