MythSearcher wrote: ↑Fri Jun 05, 2020 4:51 am
I have no objection to VFs are much more powerful than MSs in general.(Not just the fire power, but their thrust to weight ratio and operational thrust time is much higher)
Apart from generator output and energy weapon power output, the most telling metric would probably be in their maximum acceleration. A really good, fast OYW Mobile Suit isn't even pulling 1G. The Zeta tops out at 1.8G in its Waverider mode. Even the most agile mass production suits in the second century UC (UC0100+) like the League Militaire's Gun-EZ or Zanscare's Contio top out around 4.4G. The VF-1 Valkyrie's rocking 6.5G and it only goes up from there. 4th Gen VFs could easily pull over 10G from a standing start, and as noted earlier the VF-25 boasts a maximum instantaneous acceleration of 30.5G.
MythSearcher wrote: ↑Fri Jun 05, 2020 4:51 am
Just reply to give you the highest output power of MS weapons, not including anything without specs, the FAZZ HMC, 79.8 MW. They get 10 shots before over heating.
The slightly less powerful, S Gundam's BSG, 56MW(also operational in 12MW mode if it does not have enough input) is less restrictive, but still pretty large relative to the MS. The Z plus version of this gun is 50MW, no idea if it is just completely variable or a limiter is added.
Even if you look at MA class weapons, the highest is the Zoan's Mega particle cannons, 520MW, you have 2 of them on the combined Zodiac, which is one of the largest MA in the UC-verse, is still lower in power than the beam weapon you mentioned.
I was looking more at regular beam rifles... not so much the high mega cannons and other large optional weapons that impose significant penalties on the Mobile Suit's all-important mobility, but these are pretty good metrics to have nevertheless.
Had to look that last one up, since I'd never heard of it before. That's the AMA-100 Z'od-iacok from
Gundam Sentinel, right? That thing counts as a Mobile Armor? It's the size of a freaking warship. Literally almost as large as the
White Base or one of the
Northampton-class frigates from
Macross.
Though, to really put the cherry on it... the craft in
Macross that has the 2x750MW beam cannon as its main armament? That's the
SF-3A Lancer II space fighter... which is all of about 13.2 meters long.
MythSearcher wrote: ↑Fri Jun 05, 2020 4:51 am
Just interested, did they ever mention how the protoculture collapsed?
(I only watched DYRL, Plus, Zero and Frontier with very little 7 and 7d plot knowledge from the PSP Macross game using the Gundam Battle series engine)
The particulars vary depending on whether you're talking about the main/ongoing
Macross continuity or the
Macross II alternate universe continuity, but the gist of it is that their civil war got out of hand and they got decimated by the living weapons they created to fight their wars for them.
Macross II's AU runs with the explanation in
Macross: Do You Remember Love?. The Protoculture split along gender lines after the introduction of advanced cloning technology made biological reproduction obsolete, and that divide between males and females grew until they literally split into two rival factions and declared an actual war on each other. The clone armies they created for that war, the male Zentradi and female Meltrandi, fought each other with weapons of literally apocalyptic power (including the thermonuclear reaction weaponry that would later become lost technology) and the ancient Protoculture civilization was all but wiped out by the fighting as the two factions tried to destroy each other. Organized dissent to the war came far too late, and by the time people on both sides started talking about how this war thing was maybe a REALLY BAD IDEA everyone who could've ordered a cease fire was already dead and the Protoculture had effectively lost control of both of their clone armies. There was nothing they could do except run away, and they did... groups of survivors used emigrant ships to flee into deep space and try to start over on other planets outside their former territory. It's unclear how many groups of survivors were able to flee, and how many actually found somewhere else to live... but we know that they were essentially forced into a pseudo-nomadic existence as the out of control and self-sustaining war between the Zentradi and Meltrandi expanded throughout the galaxy. In some cases, like Earth, they were forced to abandon their emigrant ships and flee in smaller ships when the war neared the new home systems they had colonized. Eventually, they were unable to maintain their population and eventually died out. The Mardook in
Macross II: Lovers Again are implied to be the descendants of one of the Protoculture's refugee fleets, who've adopted a militant approach to preserving what remains of their civilization and culture using a new clone army.
Macross 7 offers a different take which is used in all subsequent works. The ancient Protoculture were a people divided along socio-political lines even before they reached the stars, and they never did manage to hit what we'd call a harmonious society. The sheer scale of their interstellar republic meant that internal schisms eventually formed and those tensions blew up into a civil war that very quickly ended up a stalemate thanks to how huge the Protoculture's Stellar Republic had been before it split and the Zentradi being used by both sides being prohibited from attacking the Protoculture. About 8 years after the war started, one arsenal planet was testing a new type of living weapon called the Evil-series. Bio-technological weapons platforms equipped with their latest and greatest weaponry and powered by an inexhaustible supply of energy drawn directly from fold space. Three years later, shortly after the ancient Protoculture first visited Earth and retrovirally modified the local homonids to accelerate their development into a sentient "sub-Protoculture" species, the Evil-series were activated for testing and their experimental power sources malfunction. Energy beings from higher-dimension space are trapped in the bodies of the Evil-series and take control of their minds. These beings, who would be known as the Protodeviln, needed higher-dimensional energy to survive and began harvesting it from the minds of the Protoculture on that arsenal planet. In order to avoid a slow death by starvation, the Protodeviln made an army out of the people they had drained of mental energy (spiritia) and rendered docile through mind control. This new force, the Supervision Army, attacked both sides and grew exponentially as it conquered new planets and added their spiritia-drained populations to its forces. The regulations prohibiting the Zentradi from attacking or interfering with the Protoculture made them incapable of fighting the Supervision Army, which was made up of brainwashed and spiritia-drained Protoculture and Zentradi. Over 85% of the Protoculture civilization was lost during the first nine months of the war, at which point the two Protoculture factions banded together and then rescinded the Zentradi's directives to not interfere with the Protoculture. The ensuing destruction took a huge chunk out of the Supervision Army, and with their "food" supply dwindling the Protodeviln weakened to the point that Protoculture who had been discovered to possess special spiritia called anima spiritia were able to capture and contain the Protodeviln, sealing them away in the laboratory where they had been created and imposing an entropy control field on the entire planet to keep people away from it. Unfortunately, this didn't free the many people who were brainwashed and enslaved by the Supervision Army, and large-scale hostilities continued, with many Protoculture planets being lost in the crossfire. Within a few years, the network connecting the colony planets broke down and control over the Zentradi was lost. Around 1,100 years later all that was left of their civilization was a few isolated planets, emigrant fleets, and space colonies out on the galactic rim due to the Supervision Army aggressively hunting them and the Zentradi indiscriminately destroying the Supervision Army's forces and any planets they were found on. The Protoculture civilization held on for around another 20,000 years before they disappeared from the galaxy and were presumed extinct. Now all that remains of them is the ruins left behind by their collapsed civilization and the many intact constructs they created that continue to operate hundreds of thousands of years after they vanished. (An awful lot of which seem to be stupidly dangerous stuff that the Protoculture deliberately sealed away, like the Delta Wave System they hid in fold space on the worlds of the Brisingr cluster, the Fold Evil they sealed away behind artificial fold faults on Uroboros, and the Protodeviln that they buried on the fourth planet of the system humans would one day call Varauta 3198XE. Humanity has found a lot of these dangerous things over the years... accidentally waking up the Protodeviln leading to a war against them in 2045-2047, and uncovering both the Fold Evil and Delta Wave System in 2060.
MythSearcher wrote: ↑Fri Jun 05, 2020 4:51 am
With such technology(above Kardeshev class 2, going towards or at class 3), unless it is something like "We(hive mind) decided to toss away our physical forms and transcend to the higher dimensions", I see no possible reason they can just suddenly disappeared. Multiple planets should have remaining pockets of these people even if the central government collapsed? If they are destroyed by a more powerful culture, we should see that more powerful culture instead.
Well, in either of the above cases, they were destroyed by their own creations... and in a fairly short period too.
The ancient Protoculture seem to have felt that actually doing the fighting themselves was beneath them, so they entrusted all of their military power to the clone armies they created to fight those wars for them. When those weapons were turned on them, they had no defense. There was little they could do in the face of weapons that could depopulate a planet in minutes except run away... and with the thousands of fleets armed with millions of ships prowling the galaxy hunting each other, there weren't many safe places to run. Eventually, the war found them and they were unable to escape again... and the lucky ones who managed to hide out on the edge of the galaxy eventually went extinct when they were unable to maintain their population.
There is a theory, based on a musical postcard mail-in gift that came with one of the 90's video games, that there is at least one surviving Protoculture enclave that escaped extinction by creating a portal into another universe or a pocket universe and living there. That postcard, which purports to be the last message from
Megaroad-01, the emigrant ship commanded by MIsa Hayase and carrying Lynn Minmay as a passenger, indicating they had found a "dark hole" near the galactic core that was transmitting music and were preparing to enter it.