EDTO name, design, and deployments: Sounds good!
Y'know, I just remembered some thoughts I'd had on why the VF concept might make sense - what if the forcefield and joint technologies that were developed for the light desdroid project were noted, by one Transformers fan on the design team, as being able to support the stresses of a true transformation - and that the preliminary design they were thinking of fore same would take the same number of joints anyway.
Assume that the fighter mode uses durability, firepower, and brute force thrust to at least stay in spitting distance of the pure fighter designs prototyped off of the same technology and there you have it.
The VF-0's sleeker lines are deceptive, that way: it looks slimmer because it's longer than the VF-1, but not thicker. Sourcing here and here, the Phoenix is four meters longer and three tons heavier - in short, it's actually bigger than its more famous descendant.
Really, I've always thought that what we see in Macross Zero is just what the Valkyrie would have looked like on a better animation budget.
Armor designs... ohboy. The biggest difference between my concepts and the canon ones is that I think I've come up with a way to armor the fighter's nose.
There's an armored cap over the nosecone, which goes back to just in front of the cockpit on top and angles rather forward underneath, to clear the lock-on points for the battloid mode's legs. Behind that, on top, there's a sort of barrel-shaped armored cover that goes on over top of the cockpit and comes down to about the equator of the nose on the sides in front and angles up a little towards the rear, then a third cover layered over top if the intakes - what becomes the upper chest in battloid.
To transform, the middle armor shell pops up a little and slides down over the top half or so of the nose cone - thus giving just enough clearance for the intake block to move 'down' into the position that normally adds the armored panel over the cockpit.
The underside of the nose is covered by a single piece, which attaches at the rear, to one of the shoulders - thus letting it swing out and around as a shield for the battloid.
Obviously, an armored Valk is going to be operating on cameras-only.
The atmospheric armor pack is obviously very sleek and low-lying, similar in look if not detail to the thing shown at the bottom of this page (as, in fact, are the leg modules), except that it has its own wings, which are rather like an F-15's, and the entire assembly uses them and leaves the core fighter's tucked away like in battloid.
The space armor is much the same as the canon Super pack, but with the main gun replaced (a gun pod version of the Tomahawk beam cannon), and dorsal pods slightly longer than in canon and about two-to-three times as wide, so that they hang out and 'down' over the sides of the plane, blocking wing extension but not the shoulder blocks. Depending on what we decide looks best, those pods might have stubby wings of their own, or just carry their heavy missiles on 'fuselage' hardpoints coming right off the FAST packs.
Oh, and, both of my designs include armor for the thighs and knees, also - which increases protection (to 'just about total') but blocks the use of gerwalk mode unless you're willing to add quite a bit of complexity.
Then again, I don't consider gerwalk terribly useful anyway, so I'd say it's worth it.
Fleet breakdown... mm. I'll need to think about it.
...
Hey, we've been spending all this time on the toys, but what about the characters? About the only thing we've established is that 'Hikaru' dislikes the military because he thinks they threw his father's life away and that 'Minmei' sounds like Amy Lee.
What's 'Misa' like? What's "Baron" Fokker's real name, and what's his girlfriend like? Etc, etc.
Ja, -n
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"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."
Quote:I'm not sure about having the different chassis - after all, you've already got your scouting and light combat functions covered by your VFs, and far better than something as clumsy as...
The modular fittings for destroids sounds good (Battletech copied the look, so copy their omnitech back). Probably there would be a few chassis - a fast, light one for scouting, a mid-range one to take best advantage of modular functions and a big bruiser with lots of armour (might be an Armored Destroid like the Armored Valkyrie).
Y'know, I just remembered some thoughts I'd had on why the VF concept might make sense - what if the forcefield and joint technologies that were developed for the light desdroid project were noted, by one Transformers fan on the design team, as being able to support the stresses of a true transformation - and that the preliminary design they were thinking of fore same would take the same number of joints anyway.
Assume that the fighter mode uses durability, firepower, and brute force thrust to at least stay in spitting distance of the pure fighter designs prototyped off of the same technology and there you have it.
The VF-0's sleeker lines are deceptive, that way: it looks slimmer because it's longer than the VF-1, but not thicker. Sourcing here and here, the Phoenix is four meters longer and three tons heavier - in short, it's actually bigger than its more famous descendant.
Really, I've always thought that what we see in Macross Zero is just what the Valkyrie would have looked like on a better animation budget.
Armor designs... ohboy. The biggest difference between my concepts and the canon ones is that I think I've come up with a way to armor the fighter's nose.
There's an armored cap over the nosecone, which goes back to just in front of the cockpit on top and angles rather forward underneath, to clear the lock-on points for the battloid mode's legs. Behind that, on top, there's a sort of barrel-shaped armored cover that goes on over top of the cockpit and comes down to about the equator of the nose on the sides in front and angles up a little towards the rear, then a third cover layered over top if the intakes - what becomes the upper chest in battloid.
To transform, the middle armor shell pops up a little and slides down over the top half or so of the nose cone - thus giving just enough clearance for the intake block to move 'down' into the position that normally adds the armored panel over the cockpit.
The underside of the nose is covered by a single piece, which attaches at the rear, to one of the shoulders - thus letting it swing out and around as a shield for the battloid.
Obviously, an armored Valk is going to be operating on cameras-only.
The atmospheric armor pack is obviously very sleek and low-lying, similar in look if not detail to the thing shown at the bottom of this page (as, in fact, are the leg modules), except that it has its own wings, which are rather like an F-15's, and the entire assembly uses them and leaves the core fighter's tucked away like in battloid.
The space armor is much the same as the canon Super pack, but with the main gun replaced (a gun pod version of the Tomahawk beam cannon), and dorsal pods slightly longer than in canon and about two-to-three times as wide, so that they hang out and 'down' over the sides of the plane, blocking wing extension but not the shoulder blocks. Depending on what we decide looks best, those pods might have stubby wings of their own, or just carry their heavy missiles on 'fuselage' hardpoints coming right off the FAST packs.
Oh, and, both of my designs include armor for the thighs and knees, also - which increases protection (to 'just about total') but blocks the use of gerwalk mode unless you're willing to add quite a bit of complexity.
Then again, I don't consider gerwalk terribly useful anyway, so I'd say it's worth it.
Quote:*points and hops up and down excitedly* Exactly! Exactly!
The alternative that springs to mind is that the Zentreadi did apparently have some light body armour that had full life support and was in a similar ballpark to the Regult for resilience i.e. made of paper. Were it to look less dorky then a jump-pack could be strapped on and the zentreadi can simply carry a gunpod equivalent, or melee weapons or zentreadi-scale man-portable heavy weapons. And that's even cheaper than a Pod.
Fleet breakdown... mm. I'll need to think about it.
...
Hey, we've been spending all this time on the toys, but what about the characters? About the only thing we've established is that 'Hikaru' dislikes the military because he thinks they threw his father's life away and that 'Minmei' sounds like Amy Lee.
What's 'Misa' like? What's "Baron" Fokker's real name, and what's his girlfriend like? Etc, etc.
Ja, -n
===========
===============================================
"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."