SDF1 - Morning of the Maiden Flight. I have been a Japanese animation fan, or anime as it is more commonly known, for over 20 years. As with any area of interest of this type there will always be the classics, those series which seem to capture the imagination more than others and go on through time immemorial. One of these series is Super Dimensional Fortress Macross (Macross) or Robotech as it is known in the States and Europe Macross or Robotech tells the tale of a huge battle-fortress, the SDF-1, which crashes to Earth on the South Pacific island of Macross during a period in Earth’s history when war in the middle-east rages and the super powers are one step away from nuclear annihilation. With the arrival of the battle-fortress the nation’s of Earth realise that they are not alone in the universe. They also realise that whatever civilisation created the fortress may one day come to reclaim it and this prompts an immediate cease-fire. Banding together under the newly created United Nations Space Agency or UN Spacey, the nations of Earth spend the next ten years re-building the battle-fortress and adapting its many and varied technologies to create the Robotech Defence Force (RDF) in the hopes that these moves will combat whatever force is sent to recover the battle-fortress. After ten years the battle-fortress is ready for its maiden flight (today’s picture) but only hours before a huge armada of warships appears from hyper-space and dispatches forces to reclaim the fortress. At this point the fortress appears to take on a life of its own and reconfigures its shape to allow firing of its main gun taking out not only the forces sent to reclaim it but a large part of the island and boiling off millions of gallons of sea water as well. In a desperate attempt to avoid the invaders the captain of the ship attempts lift-off only to have his efforts thwarted as the anti-gravity generators built into the hull of the battle-fortress rip themselves free of their mountings, unable to handle the huge weight of the fortresses hull. In the meantime the invaders launch an orbital bombardment from space in an attempt to keep the battle-fortress on the ground and follow this up with ground forces in an attempt to once again capture the fortress whilst it is still on the ground. This secondary invasion is met by the Robotech Defence Force in their Veritech (variable technology) fighters and Desteroid mobile artillery units which have been created as a direct result of studying the battle-fortress technology for the last ten years. As the battle rages on the ground around the battle-fortress, the captain makes the decision to use the ships primary drive to lift the ship to a safe distance before using it’s Space-Fold technology to jump the ship through hyperspace to the far side of the Moon in an attempt to escape the invaders and save the city surrounding the fortress from further damage. Lifting the ship into Earth’s atmosphere the battle-fortress is once again attacked by the full might of the invading armada forcing it back down toward Macross Island. As the fortress nears the ground the space-fold technology is activated enveloping not only the SDF-1 but a large part of the city and the surrounding ocean and transporting them all not to the far side of the Moon, but to the orbit of the Planet Pluto. I have mentioned this story in the past and shown a few of the images which cover it in scattered pieces but never in one block to tell the full story of the SDF-1 and its journey from Macross Island to Pluto and back again. I have now made the decision to tell the story in text and picture form in its entirety even though it means up-loading some, but not all of the pictures once again. For those who have seen some of these images before I hope you enjoy seeing them again and for those who are seeing them for the first time I hope you will enjoy the story of the SDF-1 and its journey home.