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Grrrrr... had a reply typed, then the board logged me out when I hit post, and I lost it all...

First of all, it was not my theory - I, in fact, pointed out the fundamental flaws in it. The cloning BS (and the low number of survivors) was actually part of Macross OSM from DYRL until about the time of Macross Plus/Macross 7, when it became obvious that there were serious flaws with it (and tat it could only apply to DYRL & Macross II, if you treat them as one universe). The Compendium still refers to it (As does maybe the newer chronologies), because it's required to even keep population numbers with a semblence of viability (though not, on real scrutiny).

The simple fact is that, even with the revised population numbers (the million or so), the wheels come off the population wagon from the amount of fleets we KNOW to have been launched by the post-Bodolza humans.
There were 30 Megaroad fleets.
There were AT LEAST 25 New Macross class fleets.
Then, there were at least two other fleets before Megaroad 01 left (referred to in Macross OSM - one of which might have been the fleet that founded Eden), and other such fleets like the one the Macross Q4 Global belonged to (a full-size Macross class ship set up with residential areas, that was the home of Ozma, Ranka, Brera, Cathy, Mao Nome & Grace O'Connor; presumed destroyed in 2049, but not really destroyed until 2059 when Grace folded away HALF THE PLANET into rubble to attempt to cover her tracks).

Even if 99% of the fleets were clones & Zentraedi (And remember, there was only 0.1% the number of ships in the Macross Vrlitwhai's (Breetai's) fleet, as were supposedly in the pre-Yune Breetai's fleet), Earth would have ran out of humans born of two naturally-born human parents, LONG BEFORE the Megaroad class vessels were all launched.

Hell, if one assumes 1 million native humans (perhaps 10k being children on the Macross and MAYBE dependents of people on Moonbase), 11 million clones, and 24 million Zentradi (assumes 10k Zentraedi per ship in Bretai's fleet, and 10% survival rate in the face of 40 to 1 odds), that's 36 million people - at 80k colonists (was originally stated as 300k+, but later revised downward), PLUS the crews of the ships in each fleet, you'd run out of child-bearing age non-clones before you ran out of ships, and run out of EVERYONE (even children of all the above) non-Zentraedi by the time the Macross 7 was launched in 2038.

And, what KIND of clones would you have?

Copies of existing people and their memories? That would go over like a lead balloon (especially since the cloning was flawed, ala Michael Keaton) - you really want to have 30 Bruno Grobals running around, or 30 Misa Hayase? And, if some of them are unhinged, and could pass a genetic screen to get access to things that go boom?

Totally new, composite, people? Where would you get the memories and skills to program into them, and not have them crack up from badly managed memory management (shades of Blade Runner)? and, the sheer scale of the labs needed for such creation would overwhelm the resources of the SDF-1.

Create nothing but babies? And then what? Have to Teach Zentraedi how to be parents? (it was hard enough teaching them basic human culture, and frankly parenting is something thatmany humans can't get right) Communal creches? (like the McKinney version of the Masters)

And, WHY would the damaged pre-Bodolza cities be reoccupied, if you're doing clones? It only makes sense if the occupants ARE the original occupants, plus Zentraedi. We SEE several cities (only one of them outside Macross city being new construction) in the series, in various states of occupation and reconstruction. For food distribution, it would make sense, if your population was mostly clones, to keep everyone together, until you spread out to NEW construction to lower vulnerability to attack. You sure as hell wouldn't leave people scattered over the continent, living in ruins, unless they were already there and refused to leave.

Frankly, the whole "million survivors" crap is an artifact of the DYRL universe timeline (that Kawamori attempted to retcon all of Macross into in the 80s, and the writers of Macross II, without him, attempted to continue), that should have be UN-retcon from the timeline when Kawamori and the others decided it was best to return to the franchise with a mostly-TV-series-based timeline for Plus, Seven, and Frontier (with Zero being the direct predecessor of Frontier, in terms of characters).

Aside:
Similarly, the February 2009 date for the SDF-1 launch, that HG has become so enamoured of these last few years, was ALSO a DYRL retcon. The date(s) for the launch in the pre-DYRL materials indicated 1 June or 1 July (and Macek went for 1 July), the only uncertainty being (according to my sources, some of whom have held HG's own source materials in their hand for official translation projects) that the original documents had dates written in English, and that the two letters after "Ju" were illegible from various means (including time, by the time they saw them in the mid-late 90s). And, there have been attempts in recent years to even attempt to force the DYRL "million survivors" down the throat of Robotech, when it is blatantly contra-indicated by the level of civilization we see in the Mospeada-based episodes. If Rio de Janiero (destroyed in the Invid arrival) and NYC (virtually intact in "The Big Apple") were THAT untouched in the 2030s/2040s from their pre-2009 state, and that they are two of the worlds most populous cities, that there should have been 20-30 million survivors from those two cities ALONE, before factoring in disease & starvation - and the starvation part would have been easily fixed by using Zentraedi food technology (the only areas of starvation on Earth would be where people did not have access to Zentraedi food tech, or refused to eat it - something I had as issues with in the "teetering on the edge of starvation" malcontent-era stories).


But, back to Macross. The fact that they went out of their way to incorporate items from most of western culture in the construction of New Macross Colony 7, and that New Macross Colony 25 (Macross Frontier) was an amalgam of the Los Angeles & San Francisco Bay areas of California, PLUS Polynesia (including Hawaii, one would suppose - but DEFINITELY including Macross universe "Mayan Islander" culture of the Nomes - in fact, Mao and her autobiography(s) probably made it the best understood of the lot), says that a LOT more of Earth's culture survived Bodolza, than the available timelines suggest. You don't get that level of nostalgia if people aren't from the culture that produced it in the first place, and had experienced some of it.

It's time for Kawamori to backtrack, and go back to what was apparently their original premise, which was that much of North America and the Asian Pacific Rim had been shielded from a second wave of bombardment by the Grand Cannon opening fire, and that as a result, tens of millions of people from the most diverse culture on the planet survived to reestablish that culture (and their ancestral ones) from half-destroyed ruins, when the Eastern & Southern hemisphere continents pretty much got pounded until their rubble bounced.

Personally, I think it was a truly Serendipitous coincidence - then again, given that Kawamori and other manga/anime writers appear to be into harvesting things like conspiracy theory for ideas, it's not impossible that they had access to such resources (and were going for the whole Aztec calendar 2012 end of an age thing....). On the other had, Been Done and the Antarctic Mess had better net resources than I could ever have, given their location, and should hav known better (not to mention the fact that most old enough to be Robotech fans would ALSO remember the Star Blazers episode)

Frankly, it would not surprise me to one day see a Macross product make references to pre-2009 UN facilities in salt mines under the Great Lakes (studying remnants of the Protoculture, perhaps?)....

Personally, I don't see any reason why HG should be changing any names, locations or dates already established pre-2000 to match the OSM, for purposes of keeping brand identity, should the rights agreements ever go tits up. It's especially folly to abandon one's own trademarks (registered or not) for other ones that one can get locally as a licensee, but internationally are owned & registered by the person giving you the license. Then again, with the Agrama legal/financial situation in recent years (such as the legal cases in Italy), it's not all that clear that they even have anyone experienced in business law (at least, the legit side of it) on staff.

Part of the problem is a "for want of a nail" scenario that played out with Yune's revisions.

By moving the date back to February, it made an event that occurred to a character in-series impossible to occur the way it was shown (rick surviving being shot down in Episode 16).

Rather than admit the error (which would not have been a problem with the Macross timeline, in that the time period had bee shortend to 7 months from just under 13, in the corresponding Macross chronology), Yune then forced yet another revision, having to scour the Earth for a remote island with a similar name (not even on most maps) rather than admit changing the date for episode 16 from july/august 2010 to February would change Rick's shootdown from a case of trauma and moderate hypothermia to one of death from acute hypothermia within seconds of hitting the water in his SUMMER flightsuit with open helmet.

This change, itself, caused two MORE issues. One, in that, in its correct (and still used in Macross) posisition of splashdown, you had two sets of characters going in opposite directions, events occuring within the same day - yet had the "new" location of Yune's (South China sea, instead of the Aleutians) been accurate, the two groups would have had to fly together for the entire trip of one set, and the trip taken several days, instead of one (and possibly an overnight stay AFTER the depicted events). The second issue is more traumatic, as if that second location was accurate, then the series ends in Episode #13 with the SDF-1 a pile of mangled metal from impacting the seafloor of a WAY too shallow body of water (we SEE then entire ship submerge, entering engines first, in the episode, in a near-uncontrolled reentry - Yune's spot whould have the ship hitting the bottem before it could submerge completely - never mind it would have been too close to populated areas for Gloval to have attempted to land there).

So changes for the sake of change, led to more changes, to more changes, each one an even bigger stretch and continuity rewrite or gaffe - when just NOT changing anything to start with would have caused ZERO problems.

Oh, and Cav, you're dead wrong on orbital period counterpoint you're attempting to make. There's a reason why interplanetary missions are launched only in specific windows, and missing that window (say for any flight between Earth & Mars) results in the mission being scrubbed for months, if not years (missing the window could add months to the journey, and require rocket boosters greater than what the assembled package has). The SDF-1, without fold engines, was having to use the tried and true methods of intra-system travel - and that means elliptical to parabolic courses, to meet the target body at a proper place, at approximately the same relative speed in relation to the sun. Try actually looking up the particulars on the requirements for manned missions to Mars (and the flights back to Earth), and how many miles the spacecraft will actually cover in the "short" distance between the two orbits.

Strange how "online sources" do nothing to say otherwise. If you actually read your supposed source, you'd realize that. In fact, several of the survival points it gives, were NOT in play in Rick's shootdown. He was unconscious, NOT in a protective thermal suit, HALF HIS HEAD EXPOSED AND IN THE WATER, and the fact that anyone who has watched Discovery channel in the last 5 years KNOWS what the climate is like in the area KAWAMORI set the episode in (and had it occurring in late summer/early fall even in his timelines - and perhaps a week at most passes between the splashdown and the beginning of that episode), during the month of February. On the other hand, after the splashdown, the outside air temperature (when they let people go out on deck, was EIGHTY DEGREES F - which only occurs in the far North Pacific during the summer, perhaps first few weeks of autumn. 80 degree air temps are hard to find 2000 miles SOUTH of the inferred location in February. Of, and the survival times on your page are for FIFTY degree water. If the episode, as originally written, is off Byrd Island in the Aleutians, in February, the water temperature is typically 30-33 degrees - maybe even LOWER (salt water rquires a colder temperature to freeze than fresh water).

Not shotguning - showing how changing x requires changing y requires changing z, et al... in other words, an unneeded (if outright contra-indicated), forced, retcon forcing OTHER retcons, that similarly don't work. The only shotgunning I see is you throwing up "proof" irrelevant to you point, and hoping no one is intelligent enough to read it to see that it does NOTHING to support your argument.