A little surprised by this one - As you say, Japan's samurai past was very recently in the past, and Japan was still recovering from the Restoration and the realization of just how big the world had become. Would they have been ready for something like this, and, more importantly, would the paranoid political climate of the times allowed a relative unknown like Japan, which was still very misunderstood, to participate in the project when it would have been easy to reject them on technical merits?

>2nd Lt. Dennis J. MacCrofton - A young Scottish officer serving
>in the 2nd Dragoons (Royal Scots Greys), the Royal Army cavalry
>regiment assigned to operate the non-flying Armoured Soldiers aboard
>the Macross.

DJ wants big boom. Glad to see him around.

>Sgt. Victoria Marks, USA

Does she have a source material? Or am I just airheaded today?

>The bridge crew - All young women following in the path broken
>by pioneers like Lisa Hayes and Claudia Fokker.

Wouldn't Claudia have been forced to 'retire' when she got married, given the period? I realize that Gloval wouldn't have liked to lose her, but if he fought to keep her, that certainly would have increased the dislike of the "damned russian" among his conservative political masters.

>Nikola Tesla - Though he has no official title, everyone knows
>Tesla is the reason anybody ever got anywhere with the alien
>technologies embodied by the Macross. The brilliant
>Serbo-American technologist-savant was called into the project in 1880
>after the great British scientist William Thomson and the famed
>American inventor Thomas Edison both declared that no one would ever
>get any part of the alien ship to work.

Well, that certainly explains it right there, if Edison said it, Tesla HAD to prove him wrong.

>His detractors - and
>some of his admirers - say that Tesla all but views the Macross
>as his own creation.

That certainly fits too, Tesla was a mite eccentric, wasn't he?

>John Trussell - ...A student
>of the late Charles Babbage,

Of course.

>Otto Lilienthal - A German inventor and researcher into
>heavier-than-air flight, hired by Krupp Sr. in 1882 to help with early
>development on armament applications for Übertechnologie.
>Lilienthal created the prototype Fliegenpanzersoldat in 1884,
>but a personality clash with Krupp led him to leave his countryman's
>employ and go to work for the British instead. Krupp never forgave
>Lilienthal, but died before he could make much of an issue of it. The
>Fliegenpanzersoldat went on to become known by the public as
>the Armoured Aero-Soldier after development was completed by the
>British.

He was brilliant, wasn't he?

>Members of the Public
>
>Miss Lynn Mayminster, Countess Macross -

OWIE. BRAIN HURTS.

>Samuel Clemens - American author and humorist, well-known by
>the pen name "Mark Twain". He has nothing to do with the
>Macross project (in fact, he thinks the Grand Alliance was a
>damn-fool idea and the United States ought to have stayed out of it),
>but was invited to Macross Island and the ship's launching ceremony by
>his good friend Tesla.

You know, that may be the single most brilliant piece of casting ever done in and UF piece. Would have liked to see his contemporary, Jules Verne, there too - some of the concepts in his books would have been proven a mere ten to twenty years after he wrote about them, and one would think he wouldn't have missed this launch for the world.

-D-