Macross Firepower

[WhiteLion]

Hi guys, I was wondering, in your opinion what power do the weapons of Macross' ships have? For example the SDF-1 or the new ship?
If someone has seen the series you could estimate a range of power for the weapons, at least to identify if they are in the range of gigatons or megatons. The main cannon should be in the range of the moving wave cannon of the Yamato Battleship 2199

[Vendetta]

For most weapons, quite low power.

When we see the Zentradi ships bombard earth at the start of the series, their weapons fire collapses buildings but doesn't appear to be delivering a lot of explosive force, and what explosions we do see are contained within the footprint of the buildings they hit.

Remember that throughout the franchise, modern equivalent nuclear weapons are considered a powerful anti-ship weapon.

[Lord Revan]

The thing to remember is that it doesn't really take that big of an explosion by scifi scale to create a mushroom cloud so an explosion creating a mushroom cloud doesn't have to mean nuclear level yields (in fact you might even be able to create a small and short lived mushroom cloud with a yield of less then 1 ton).

[Vendetta]

They do explicitly use nuclear anti-ship missiles (and artillery shells on the Monster/Konig Monster class destroid). In-show they're called "reaction weapons" because of taboo about using the words "nuclear weapons" in Japan in the early 1980s.

It's notable because the Zentradi can't make them and don't have any and they're surprised that the relatively primitive Earth does have them.

The Reflex Cannons on the Macross class and larger Zentradi ships are more powerful than the common weapons, but still not excessively so. In the final episodes of Frontier City F takes several hits from Galaxy's reflex cannon and it deals mostly localised damage, definitely sub-kiloton levels of energy make it through the armour shell (we don't know what type of energy shielding the New Macross class' city sections have, if any, but the original did have them).

Nowhere near as powerful as the Wave Motion Gun, which was able to destroy a floating continent the size of Australia.

Also of note, the Zentradi bombardment of Earth leaves the surface cratered and blasted but caused no melting, and took slightly north of six million ships to execute.

[WhiteLion]

Ok, I haven't seen the series so I have no idea about the targets it hits. So it's in the kiloton range. Is the main cannon of the Macross SDF-1 also non-gigaton power? I saw a video about it but it only hit enemy ships, so I can't get an idea. Does the series also affect planets or asteroids?

[Vendetta]

The only time we see a large weapon hit an asteroid that I can remember of the top of my head is a Vajra fires its main weapon at one that is just about big enough for Macross Quarter to hide behind (Macross Frontier ep. 7). Quarter is 300m tall, and the asteroid is fragmented, so that puts the Vajra main weapons at about 25-30 kiloton.

There's nothing to indicate that anyone else's weapons are considerably more powerful.