Zent Ships and their onboard factories

[keir451]

Remember the people of Macross Island, were on an Island! The probability that the government would allow a cell phone carrier to park a ton of cell towers is unlikely. Then of course, when the island was taken on board the SDF1, do you think they would really recreate those towers? Possibly not.

But they were airing TV through the hull of the ship...

Actually, it wasn't so much that they were deliberately broadcasting TV sognals outside the hull of the ship, but that the signals proably rode a detectable frequency that the Zents picked up on. Not like the crew of the SDF-1 were particularly anal about communication security protocols outside of the military, despite the populace being on a warship.

[Seto Kaiba]

the robot phone obviously used wireless tech, since it was mobile, but presumably the network it was on was made to be very secure. [...]

Or it was simply incapable of broadcasting strongly enough to penetrate the reinforced hypercarbon hull skin of the SDF-1. With all the metal and/or pseudometallic composite in the ship's structure, I'd imagine that providing cell phone signal on it would be rather impractical... you'd need a lot of low-powered signal stations to cope with reflection and interference due both to military transmissions and other signal sources, which would make it a heck of a lot cheaper to just say "Hey, just stick to payphones guys".

(I'm speaking from the heart there, I live in a bad signal area as a result of disruptive interference from government-owned broadcasting hardware and my cell carrier gave me a femtocell to compensate for it.)

Actually, it wasn't so much that they were deliberately broadcasting TV sognals outside the hull of the ship, but that the signals proably rode a detectable frequency that the Zents picked up on.

And there was an awful lot of static and distortion in the signal when they were receiving it from just a couple minutes away...

Suppose that as far back as XXXX (yes, I meant to be ambiguous here) there is an alternate world split off, and the resulting Robotech timeline never saw a dissemination of the basic technology that powers these civilian technologies? [...]

It's possible... I suppose it depends chiefly on how far back the Global War really goes, and how bitterly contested it was.

[mech798]

It's possible... I suppose it depends chiefly on how far back the Global War really goes, and how bitterly contested it was.

Great Britain didn't go off rationing for some materials until the 1950s-- so a long, major global war that involved a lot of attacks on infrastructure could very well see a retarding effect on civilian godos come into play. Which actually makes a great deal of sense-- you have a phone that follows you around and is smart enough to look for "rick hunter" but you're not having to churn out a million individual phones. in this case, the general civilian lifestyle in the 2000s might actually be closer to that of the 1970's with some major differences. After Macross of course, nobody has any TIME for a lot of civilian development.

[Seto Kaiba]

Lost power, off the grid for five days, yadda yadda, carry on...

The basic thought here isn't just the Global war, but literally going back t what feels like the late 50s and early 60s for the first changes in "reality" here. [...]

That was pretty much what I was demonstrating... depending on where the change occurred, history in Robotech got off the rails as early as 1943, which is well before many of the technologies that are absent in Robotech but present here in the modern real world came into being.

According to the RPG, and indeed Tommy Yune himself, after the Zentradi Holocaust there WAS a military dictatorship... the Earth gov't was pretty much just for show, and the real authority rested with the military's top brass. (Though some fans do not agree with this interpretation, for various reasons.) I think "Feudal" is one of those words that the writers of RT honestly misused.

[Seto Kaiba]

I doubt its the case, but was the concept of feudalism even present in the OSM?

Kind of... it's complicated.

Long story short, the original concept for Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross which motivated most of the design work for the series was to juxtapose the storied history of Japan's Sengoku period into a far-future setting. That's why the Arming Doublet bears such a strong resemblance to the classical armor used during that period, and why so many of the guns look vaguely like more primitive weapons. The Sengoku period was in Japan's feudal era, which nominally ended with the Meiji Restoration in 1868.

The non-visual references to feudal Japan did not survive into the finished work, however... and the planet Glorie was not a feudal society, it had a modern democratic legislature.

[cawest]

I have been thing about hiding your Zen ship.... I remembered the P-38 Glacier Girl. how about hiding your ship under the ice or a mix of sea water and ice. there are some ice sheets 3 miles think in RL. all that dust in the air... nuk winter..... so Norway's and its bays might be nice and ice covered.