Zentraedi Gnerl fighter (REF refit)

[Seto Kaiba]

I hate to break it to you (no, not really), but you're wrong here as well. In actual fact, the definition of a "power dive" as used in modern aviation is a dive in which the aircraft is accelerated by both gravity and the continuous application of full (or near-full) thrust from its engines.

Nothing about how long the engines have to be running though or how long the dive lasts.

Um... you may want to try reading that again, because I'm pretty darn sure that "continuous" is a fair indicator of how long he'd need to be running his engines for it to constitute a power dive, and we can see just fine how much thrust he applied, because we get a close-up of the throttle lever when he jettisons the Beta. It was not a power dive.


@Gryphon:

Further to my last post, the OSM Gnerl's length is all that's given in the official coverage from Macross Chronicle, but there's no shortage of art from which the other dimensions can be extrapolated. Using Macross: Perfect Memory for material (pg175), the dimensions of the Gnerl are approximately as follows (give or take half an inch):

Length: 20.6m (67'7")
Height: 12.53m (41'1") w/ "wing" vanes unfolded, 7.89m (25'11") w/ vanes folded, 9.15m (30'0") w/ landing skids deployed
Width: 14.83m (48'8") w/ vanes unfolded, 8.93m (29'4") w/ vanes folded. (Note, all widths measured at maximum cross-section.)

It's harder to get a read on precisely how large the cockpit is, since it's tapered and all... my best guess puts it at around 6m front-to-back, and ~2m across, though it's impossible to say for sure because the access hatch runs the entire length of the craft's front section, far longer than actually necessary for embarkation.

[ArmySGT.]

I admit to being curious about what roles were filled, versus what practical roles a corvette mod for a Gnerl (which again, I still can't see the actual need for) could fulfill.

VFs are going to have "short legs" for space patrol.... Granted Q versions are a strong option. A corvette gives enough wiggle room that a pilot and co-pilot have a toilet, and limited food and drink for long sorties. Your VF is only going to be good for up to eight hours.... Four hours out and four hours back. A corvette with 2-4 personnel can do a long duration patrol 24 hours to 72 hours..... Rings of Saturn? Asteroid belt just after Mars. Low sweeps over the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus.... etc.

Allows the GM to have all the players in one boat if you want to run an escape scenario, or other situation when it would be easier (or more plausible) for a accident or situation to affect one ship and not 4-6 VFs.

A converted team of Gnerls can go have a look at anomalous sensor contacts. A Gnerl corvette can be on escort duty protecting supplies moving out system to Space Station Liberty, IO, or any research platforms or listening stations. Bolt on external hardpoints and converted Gnerls are the heavy hitter strike platform to be protected by VFs..... Rebuild one as an Elint or Wild Weasel platform.

Use one as a clandestine insertion craft...... It moves in close to a still loyal Zentraedi vessel and deploys micronian military specialists that are going to tag the hull with transponders, tap the long range communications, interstellar communications, and possibly sabotage systems like the fold drive.

[Seto Kaiba]

VFs are going to have "short legs" for space patrol....[...]

Um... says who?

To date, the only VF in all of Robotech that has ever been asserted to have "short legs" in space flight is the VF/A-6 Alpha fighter. Understandably so, as the fighter's design is extremely compact and what limited internal space hasn't been given over to engines and other flight-vital systems is occupied by micro-ordinance. Part of this is, naturally, down to the role the original show put the Legioss in... that of a short-range, orbit-to-surface fighter platform. The same doesn't hold true for the VF-1, for example, which is going into it with ~4x the tank capacity of an Alpha, and also boasts FAST packs and other options to increase its propellant capacity significantly*. Even without them, the VF-1 was depicted as having pretty impressive range in space, e.g. the Battle of Saturn's Rings, and should be more than suitable for space patrol use. After all, the Beta's supposed to be a long-range space fighter-bomber and the VF-1's got more tank space than that as well.


* OSM specs for the version of the VF-1 Valkyrie's FAST pack seen in the original Macross series and, as a result, Robotech as well, boosts the VF-1's fuel load by 4.56x (not counting the fuel allocation for the dorsal rocket boosters). Other additional hardware mentioned includes a fuel bladder system that could be installed in the sub-intakes and main intakes behind the protective cover, and Option Pack choices that include additional tanks of propellant for the dorsal rocket boosters.

In fact, the VF-1 is OSM-ly perfectly capable as a space patrol craft... which means it's a safe bet that Robotech would also consider it a viable patrol option. The Lost Two Years, a story in the Macross: Perfect Memory artbook, indicates that Hikaru (Rick) actually spent the timeskip between Ep27 and Ep28 serving as a space patrol flight leader, operating out of a base on the the moon.

A corvette gives enough wiggle room that a pilot and co-pilot have a toilet, and limited food and drink for long sorties. Your VF is only going to be good for up to eight hours.... Four hours out and four hours back.

While I don't deny that a larger plane offers some significant advantages for long-term patrols, is one really necessary for post-war Earth? Both in the RPG and the series, post-war humanity had the Star Trek-style generic sensor systems which boasted extremely long ranges and considerable precision (barring jamming), effectively eliminating the need to put together a dedicated recon flight. Robotech greatly expanded the time it takes to travel between planets or moons without a fold jump, which means that trying to fly a short-range craft like a Gnerl out to Mars or Saturn would take FAR longer than a day and a half. If you've got a fold-capable ship out there deploying them, why not leverage the far more powerful sensor systems of the ship, or deploy multiple, shorter-ranged recon flights to cover more area in less time?

Allows the GM to have all the players in one boat if you want to run an escape scenario, or other situation when it would be easier (or more plausible) for a accident or situation to affect one ship and not 4-6 VFs.

Isn't that what we have small ships like Garfish-class transporters and Horizon-class shuttles for?

(In theory, you can get as many as five VFs on a single Horizon-T... four in the cargo pods, and one on the ventral hull.)

A converted team of Gnerls can go have a look at anomalous sensor contacts. A Gnerl corvette can be on escort duty protecting supplies moving out system to Space Station Liberty, IO, or any research platforms or listening stations.

As I said above, the distances and travel times involved in interplanetary sublight transit in Robotech would mean an escort detail like that would be impractical. The only way to cover distances like that quickly and effectively (meaning: a way that doesn't involve a trip that's five months one-way) is by fold jump, which invalidates the need for escort fighters capable of long-range transit. Any installation that's close enough to make a sublight trip in a reasonable amount of time (pretty much distances of one light-second or less, so Earth to Earth-orbit or the moon) without resorting to fold jumping would be well within the known capabilities of the VFs in the series... arguably even the Alpha.

Bolt on external hardpoints and converted Gnerls are the heavy hitter strike platform to be protected by VFs..... Rebuild one as an Elint or Wild Weasel platform.

There's not much room in the Gnerl's airframe for ordinance, and with nobody but humans using radar platforms and SAMs, the Wild Weasel role pretty much doesn't exist anymore. Looking at it, there's not really anywhere you could safely put a hardpoint on the Gnerl... its hull is liberally peppered with high-thrust vernier ports and its six missile launchers. Going for the ventral hull isn't an option, since that'd get in the way of the landing skids, verniers, and existing launchers. A Gnerl isn't even a lifting body, it flies on raw, vectored thrust alone... so adding significant extra weight would really be taking your life into your hands.

Use one as a clandestine insertion craft...... It moves in close to a still loyal Zentraedi vessel and deploys micronian military specialists that are going to tag the hull with transponders, tap the long range communications, interstellar communications, and possibly sabotage systems like the fold drive.

As far as we're aware, both OSM-ly and in Robotech, the long-range/FTL communications, sensors, etc. are part of a ship's fold drive... and the only ships in Robotech with their fold systems on or near the outer hull are those built by humans: the Garfish and Ikazuchi-class ships.

[Seto Kaiba]

The Gnerl has four uses in a post First Robotech War universe.

1. The UEEF equivalent of agressor training. Zentraedi pilots who aren't micronized fly Gnerls against VF-1s and other fighters to keep up training for new recruits.

Not sure how useful that'd be, since the UEEF doesn't seem to have been preparing to fight more Zentradi... but I'll admit that's at least halfway plausible. I'd imagine more common units like Regults and higher mobility units like Q-Raus would've featured more prominently in that though.

2. Secondary Robotech canon indicates that the Gnerls are used to surprise Richards in the last attack of Breetai and the Sentinels vs Richards and the Regent. The RPG also indicates Zentraedi on the expeditionary mission used older mecha because they couldn't fit into the canopies of Alphas and Betas. [...]

You mean "Edwards", right? Yeah, that's been mentioned here before, as a reason why the UEDF wouldn't have converted the surviving Gnerl units for human-sized pilots. Breetai's UEEF Zentradi troops had dibs, though in current official canon's version of events, attrition and other issues had forced Breetai's Zentradi troops to adopt the Bioroid Interceptor at some point prior to Edwards' betrayal. There wouldn't/shouldn't have been any units left for the UEDF to convert.

3. Fighters to fill the ranks of Earth defenses. Given Dolza's fleet falling like teardrops from the blue sky, and the lack of people surviving on the planet, you're going to need hulls to fly until your production comes online. As an interim solution, the Gnerl makes sense for short term use.

As has been pointed out in previous posts, there wasn't any actual need for this... within a year or two of the war's end, the Earth Forces are already rolling out upgrades for the VF-1 and several new models of fighter. The RPG only covers a couple of the Masters War-era fighters, but we know several were already entering production shortly after the Zentradi main fleet's destruction. Using Gnerls to fill the ranks of Earth's defenses would be a controversial move at best, as they were having significant issues with Zentradi malcontents... and those fighters would only be usable by full-size Zentradi, unless significant time and resources were invested in converting them for human use... which would be a waste of time, materials, and manpower that would've been better spent on Earth's reconstruction, and ongoing defense programs such as the YF-4, VF-X-6, VF-X-7, and the numerous fighters that were introduced in this period.

4. Target drones/AI drones-The Gnerl is a nice platform for both.

That's been tossed around too, though a lack of viable airframes and the pressing need to supply Breetai's forces might've put paid to that possibility. The Gnerl would be a good fit for the Ghost's AI, since they have similar flight profiles and weapons configurations.

[jaymz]

Well as far as Canon goes there is no indication they converted them for human use.

As far as MY Canon goes....they converted a few one offs just because for specific uses. The rest are either used by full sized Zentraedi until they were Micronized (all are micronized by the time they leave for Tirol in my Canon) and the remainder were converted for use as Ghost fighters with most were left behind with the Orbital forces of earth to bolster them fureter in a defensive capacity.

[Seto Kaiba]

VF-1R Valkyrie (2014), can't say for sure, but if these are rebuilds, there aren't likely to be that many around

According to official canon sources, the VF-1 A and J types were converted to the R type in the years following the war, so there are a fair few of 'em.

Carpenter's fighter, this one is the single most likely candidate,

Indeed, though the RPG left it out.

F/A-110 Falcon II (2015), unimportant, its an air breather, and in a different role
F/A-109 Sylphid (2016), see above

Just for the sake of noting a hole, the RPG does not, in fact, state that either craft isn't space-capable. Also, considering the setting, it'd be damnably odd if the UEG built any jet fighter that wasn't. As far as I can find, there isn't any canon or OSM evidence to suggest they aren't space-capable.

EDIT: Also, both are described as multi-role fighter/attack planes in their fluff.

VF-8 Logan (2018), umm...right...does this cover any actual aspect of the Gnerl's flight regime?

The Gnerl's a short-ranged, lightly armed dogfighter... so yeah. The two occupy more or less the same operational niche.

And lastly, nothing we see tells us that Zentreadi wouldn't typically be of a reasonable size when micronized,

Aaaaaaactually... the Prelude limited comic is probably the factor behind that official remark about Zentradi not fitting in human mecha. It depicted all Zentradi as being like Breetai, an army of 7'+ light blue giants.

Azonia and Khyron, and Khyron and his second, they all look to be of average size compared to humans.

Kamjin/Khyron was actually a fair bit taller than the average Zentradi, per his OSM bio spec... and Oigul/Grell was no shrimp either.

[Seto Kaiba]

Right, but while none of the three were micronized, when Miriya is compared to the somewhat statuesque Azonia, even the pseudo-amazon figure she cuts isn't beyond that or a Roy Fokker or Ben Dixon.

Per Prelude, Miriya appears to be the exception rather than the rule as far as Robotech is concerned.

And we see Azonia, Khyron and Grell aren't massive either.

Actually, both Kamjin and Oigul are over 11m tall, making them substantially taller than the average Zentradi. Laplamiz was also significantly taller than the average female. Using the scale factor we know is applied to the characters, Kamjin (who you know as Khyron) would have been precisely 237cm (7'9") tall when micloned. Oigul would have been similarly tall, and Laplamiz (Azonia) would be a fairly statuesque woman topping 6 feet. Britai's even bigger... at the official scale factor, he would be over 8'7", and Prelude shows that ALL of the UEEF Zentradi forces (except Miriya) were around his height. Roy might've been a damn tall fellow, at a whopping 7' even, but guys like Kamjin/Khyron would be a head taller still.

Really, I intend to ignore the concept of huge Zentreadi also, since it isn't supported in The Macross Saga, other than Breetai [...]

But the point here is that it IS supported by official, canon RTSC material... which is why that's the tack the official RTSC art book and the 2E RPG are going with. You are, naturally, welcome to do as you please with your game.

(who would be a bit taller than Roy Fokker, and more hefty than Ben of course)

If by "a bit" you mean "almost two feet taller", then yes... Roy's 7 feet tall per his OSM bio, though RT scaled him down to just 6'5". Britai's height remained unchanged, meaning the gap actually widened. Oddly, Ben would actually outweigh our boy Britai by a few kg, per their official stated weights and the scale factor. Britai'd be 134kg (295lb), Hayao/Ben weighs 140kg (308.6lb).

Otherwise, all the rest seem like they could easily accommodate Terran design constraints.

As I've illustrated above, that ain't even remotely the case.