First, I'll apologise for any details of timing I get wrong - I don't have the energy to research this properly right now and am working from memory.

At this point in history (c. 187X-8X), the biggest concern of the leadership of Japan is not ending up like the Congo. They know that it's the European countries who have the power, and that, in the eyes of same, they themselves are just another flavor of gooks.

Thus, their number-one priority is obtaining enough power - military power, because it's the most final sort - to say 'no' and make it stick.

So, when the Macross comes down, they're in the process of importing military technology of all sorts - up to and including commissioning entire battleships from French and English shipyards. They have a small but capable and entirely modern navy, by the standards of the time, and more importantly, the South Pacific is much closer to Japan, and the centers of Japanese power, than it is to Britain or even the US.

So when they go to ask to be let in to the Grand Alliance, whatever polite words get used, in the background is the awareness that the Japanese fleet is sailing on a 'Goodwill Mission' in easy shelling range of the Macross herself, or could be, anyway.

No, that would not go down easily, but it's not like they're in a position to try to take sole control, is it. So it would be tense, but livable...

The other factor I see is that weapons technology hasn't neccessarily caught up to materials tech. That is, the guns you can fit on an Armored Aero-Soldier are a lot less lethal against their armor than a ordinary gun is against an ordinary solider. Which means that, in at least some circumstances, melee combat is still practical.

Japan's samurai heritage isn't exactly the last living tradition of melee combat, but its European counterparts are pale, thin things by this point, starved by decades, even centuries of neglect in favor of firearm tactics.

Because those work better. For ordinary soldiers.

>>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.

I'm too boggled at the idea of Edison giving up to really comment.

>>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?

...yeah. If one is given to extreme understatement.

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

...

*eyes Geoff* ...no, I won't ask.

Either way, though, I approve wholeheartedly!

Ja, -n