Quote:Yeeeaaah, that's not gonna fly. 17Mtons is way beyond the capability of any realistic reaction drive to lift in a 1G field. Just not going to happen. We've finally hit the Plausibility Wall.
(scarfing density figures from here suggests a mass of at least seventeen billion (17*10^9) tons...)
I can think of two ways to get around it off the top of my head. The first sacrifices faithfulness to the original version in favor of plausibility: we don't let the Macross land on Tinian, or anywhere else. The ship makes a stable parking orbit, we find it, yadda yadda. This would require some serious revision to the story, but it would allow us to tack fusion rockets or whatever onto the SDF-1 and fly it around without worrying about how it's going to get off the ground.
The second shaves off plausibility in favor of holding close to the original story. Beefing up the antigravity systems gives us the right type of handwavium to allow the Macross to lift from Tinian and would work as our inertial mass-cancel device. The core problem with this is then we're stuck with a bunch of "if X, then Y" questions that need to be answered in terms of how handy the antigravity is (like, if antigrav works well enough for liftoff, why need reaction-based thrusters to begin with?)
Re: The grand tour, I don't think we need to justify that as a technical issue. It would work better as an in-story thing; once the Macross realizes that they're the primary target of the Zentraedi assault, they'll want to delay their return as much as possible, try to pick off the enemy and/or give Earth more time to prepare for another attack.---
Mr. Fnord, interdimensional man of mystery.
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Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery
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