319.53 To 319.41 – Chapter 8, Act 2, Strip 93

A fitting end to this conflict, which we can now clearly rate a mutually destructive engagement.

With both giant mecha destructively decommissioned, Team Good can claim victory: it is clear that Team Evil suffered higher losses, since their mecha wasn’t a worthless piece of junk from the start, unlike 8-Megadork-8. Does that mean…? Could it be that 8-Megadork-8’s flawed design wasn’t actually the result of 8-Dork-8’s vanity, but a clever choice to ensure precisely this outcome?
…no, wait. I forgot that 8-Dork-8’s design is just as flawed. Fat chance he’d come with a feasible, let alone effective, plan, even just by accident. >_>

And, yeah…Japanese mecha shows count on a huge amount of willing suspension of disbelief when it comes to the interior volume of mecha in comparison to their external appearance. In addition to the powerplant, mechanics and everything else a giant robo would require to just basically function, an anime mecha can fit enough extra parts to transform into 2-3 other mecha, as well as the hydraulics etc. those transformations would require. And on top of that, a large part of its internal space can be taken up by huge batteries of missiles…for which an apparently unlimited amount of reloads are also carried and stored somewhere internally. And apparently they’re stored very safely, since they never cause internal ammunition explosions when the mecha is hit. So, yeah…definitely a case of big things in small packages…

“Unguided”, by the way, isn’t entirely the right word to describe the missiles on a typical mecha show. They tend to go back and forth between behaving like unguided missiles and behaving like guided ones, depending on the demands of the plot at any given point. Or sometimes just depending on what the artists think looks cooler, I guess?

More on Monday.

5 Replies to “319.53 To 319.41 – Chapter 8, Act 2, Strip 93”

  1. I guess for anime missiles, there is unguided, guided more or less directly at the target, and ‘let’s see how ridiculous we can make their flight path and still get away with it’

    1. Yeah, that’s exactly the thing I was referring to – I was never really sure how I was supposed to interpret those kinky flight paths: guided mid-course correction or just a truly odd pre-programmed trajectory. XD

  2. Can’t have a Macross parody without a Macross Missile Massacre (along with the necessary Roboteching that actually allows that many missiles to hit the intended target instead of each other or have 99% of them scatter off ).

    1. Yeah, that’s what I was going for, just with somewhat fewer missiles…not to make it more realistic, mind you, just because I was too lazy to draw more missiles. And I felt that that was a very proper impulse for the B-movie context, so I followed it. XD

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