The New Beginning: Thoughts on SMS

Saturday, April 26, 2008

Thoughts on SMS

The civilian military provider (private military contractor?) in Macross Frontier--why does it have the VF25 while the UN Spacy forces are equipped with a modified version of the VF17? Why isn't the fleet equipped with the VF19 or the VF22? Or the VF25, for that matter? One could argue that a civilian company can invest in R&D and thus be equipped with the best and latest (like in today's world), but how does the political economy of the Macross universe function to make this possible? And why would they be tasked with defense of the fleet, rather than secondary operations? If they're the elite, shouldn't they be incorporated into a formal military command, instead of responding to call of the UN President? And what explains the bad showing of the UN Spacy fleet in episode one? Obsolete variable fighters? Poor pilot skills? Wouldn't the military be under pressure to upgrade and speed up training if that were the case? And shouldn't the colonization fleet stop, until the unknown threat has been evaluated and adequate measures have been introduced to counter it, instead of travelling further into unexplored and dangerous territory?

Perhaps the SMS was created in order to make a statement about contemporary political affairs, or at least to mirror them. However, it doesn't make much sense.

But if you can ignore questions like these, you'll enjoy the series.

Edit: Many of the links below answer the above questions by supplying information from the episodes themselves--it pays to know Japanese or have access to subtitles I suppose. Haha.

According to what I've read, the purpose of SMS is to test-fly new variable fighters; but, they've also been brought in to deal with the new alien threat since their aircraft are the only ones capable of taking the aliens on. Still, one would expect the fleet to begin producing the new planes once testing is complete.

For a certain inquirer:
Wiki info about Macross, R obotech (TV Series):

Robotech was one of the first anime televised in the United States that attempted to include most of the complexity and drama of its original Japanese source material. Produced by Harmony Gold USA, Inc. in association with Tatsunoko Prod. Co., Ltd., Robotech is a story adapted with edited content and revised dialogue from the animation of three different mecha anime series: The Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, and Genesis Climber Mospeada. Harmony Gold's cited reasoning for combining these unrelated series was its decision to market Macross for American weekday syndication television, which required a minimum of 65 episodes at the time (thirteen weeks at five episodes per week). Macross and the two other series each had fewer episodes than required since they originally aired in Japan as a weekly series.

The New Beginning

Saturday, April 26, 2008

Thoughts on SMS

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