[Tk3997]

Originally Posted by Tak

Well, we never had concrete evidence stating Zents couldn't repair or maintain their own ships. Although Milia and a certain Ally Killer came back with the same battlesuit/battle pod over and over again after numerous battles. Moreover, the three Zent spies who infiltrated Macross were also shown to be able to repair their own tac-pods.

Certainly they know how to repair their crap.

Fixing minor damage and routine feild repairs are different things then comprehensive rebuilding or repairing major battle damage. An aircraft maintainer can keep an F-22 running forward deployed, but he couldn't rebuild it or fix severe structural damage. The zents can obviously perform normal maintenance on there embarked mecha in order to keep them running and combat ready, but that's a different beast then rebuilding or fixing them after major battle damage.

Acutally I'm 99% sure it's stated that they have no real clue how allot of there stuff works and that this was done on purpose. Understanding of underlying concepts is not at all required to use or even perform crude repairs of a machine. Many of us can perform small repairs on our cars, but we can't replace a transmission or rebuild a blown engine block. After all the Zent's weapons were pretty much all built in giant automated factories (that themselves by the time of the Macross where starting to fail) which ought to be proof enough that none of them really understood how they worked so almost surely ruled out any complex high level maintenance.

All we really need to look at to see this fact is that even after thousands of years they use the exact same weapons no attempts to adapt, no feild modifications, no new models just slogging along with the same stuff they always had churned out by an increasingly dwindling supply of automated factories to and ever shrinking Zentradi fleet. The Zents were on the slow road to extinction before they encountered the UN.

Some tend to cite the 'broken glass' on Breetai's battleship as an example, but who the heck keeps a spare 'glass' on stand-by? Even modern naval vessels don't have that. And one should remember the Zent fleets were also very far away from their nearest supply joint. For the duration of Macross, Breetai was stationed near Earth and almost never had the opportunity to leave.

Who leaves Broken glass just laying around there ship though... maybe it's not definitive proof, but the interior of the bloody flag ship looking rather ramshackle can't be totally dismissed either IMO.

But otherwise, the quality of Zent weapons is guaranteed no matter when it was made

- Tak

Absurdly unlike there is no sane reason to think that protoculture factories all produced uniform quality let alone that this was maintained as they went without maintenance for thousands of years and began to break down.

Originally Posted by Burner of Anime

Okay, so the human race was hammered half to hell by giant aliens in nearly broken ships.

Now, if that isn't a statement on zentradi quality then I don't know what is

Yeah ohh... 5 million to 1 odds can even out quite a bit.

5 Million guys with rocks and sticks could killed one guy even if he had a machine gun and unlimited ammo.