Space Battleship Yamato 2202

Well sure, but it’s been out for a while. One would think that higher-resolution scans would have been popping up on Pinterest or Twitter by now. I’ve been searching both for weeks and nothing of a reasonable quality.

 

If I had known about the kit about a year ago I would have gotten it. Instead I got the Andromeda kit as a birthday present for a friend. We were tempted by this new one, but he doesn't have a need for another 1/1000th scale Andromeda and I myself don't have the room for one myself. We've mostly been buying the smaller Mecha Colle kits. They are cheaper, smaller, and easy to build. Also they can sometimes be used with the even smaller miniatures for gaming purposes, due to have large some of these ships have gotten since their original 1970s era appearances.

 

Updated images back in this thread, including adding credits for the Andromeda's, Dreadnaughts and Musashi/Ginga, added new "Washington" variant to the Dreadnaughts and made other color/accuracy adjustments to all of them.

Will be working on a colorized 2199 Yamato and Murasame Cruiser before proceeding to the others.

 

I was trying to figure out what you were calling "Washington". Now that I see it I go, "Oh that paint job". The "YF" presumably means "Yamanami Fleet" thought the translation programs suggest "Yamanashi Fleet". It is unclear why at this time.
Yamanashi being the Japanese Prefecture where northern part of Mt. Fuji is located.
Yamanami being the captain of the Andromeda and head of the fleet at Saturn.

Having read a few other google translated plot descriptions...Yamanami Fleet, is likely the correct one.

 

Got it, I will make that correction, thank you! I want to be as accurate as possible with these, considering how many variants have appeared. I found one image out there that labeled that particular paint style Washington (hence the name I chose), but it’s entirely possible that was merely conjectural, or possibly one named vessel assigned to the greater Yamanami “Black Stripe” fleet. Some pics I’ve found are written in Greek, of all things, which I have yet to translate, and may potentially have some useful information in them.

And now I’m wondering if I have the generic Earth Defense Fleet and Mars Fleet Dreadnaught designs revered. The text I read on Yamato2202.net said Earth/Mars respectively in that order, along with the two ships in the same order, but it recently occurred to me that, despite Katakana being a left to-right Romanized language, Japanese generally read things from right-to-left, which would mean the red/orange Dreadnaught labeled “M23” is the Mars Fleet ship and the blue one from Earth, which makes a whole lot of sense now that I’m thinking about it.

Man, I wish I was fluent in all forms of Japanese (and Greek). I’d know what all these ships were just by reading all the Yamato-related Twitter.jp feeds.

 

The red is the Mars ones, the blue being the Earth ones (specifically something about the space in between? @Ithekro would know more).

 

Hi @Ithekro, do you happen to know something Dai Yamato Zero..?

 

The blue ones with the red stripe are suppose to be something like the Earth Absolute Defense Line, or something like that. They aren't exactly the Earth Defense Fleet, but they aren't the Mars Defense Fleet (which are the red-orange ones). They are suppose to hold the space between the two planets. They are likely the emergency construction, thus the fleet was probably not on the original plan list, but they came up with a color for it anyway. The Mars Fleet has actual pennant numbers on the hull, so I think those were a planned unit, much like the group at Saturn with the original paint job had pennant numbers (the Dreadnoughts in the opening part of Saturn actually have their names on the hull, while later ships don't seem to have names that we can see. Dreadnought, I believe, was actually the flagship of the first group of ships we see at Saturn).

We don't see many Mars Fleet ships. Its possible they were lost between times we start to see the action again, or they just hadn't built all that many of them yet at the start of the conflict. We see two in those colors strapped onto Andromeda around that time (M22 and M23), but most of the Dreadnoughts we see in action at that point are the Earth Defense Line Fleet ships (with some YF ships the survived Saturn).

Unfortunately I don't know too much about it. I've not seen the manga for it at all, and only seen one or two episodes of the anime.

 

Thank you anyway. It seems that Dai Yamato is the great unknown of the Yamato saga....

 

BTW, I believe the picture you showed belongs to Dai Ginga (Great Galaxy). That was actually Matsumoto's SECOND attempt when he couldn't secure the rights to Dai Yamato from Nishizaki (when he was still alive). That ship looks like this ... note all the extra dorsal and ventral turrets, but more like the original than the second one did with all the extra greebles:

 

I both do and don't like that ship. It looks good and all, but isn't scaled to a nearly absurd size for its windows. Wasn't this the one that was suppose to be 999 meters long? That's three times the length of the Yamato 2199 version of the ship, and the original wasn't usually scaled out to what it was draw at (Yamato's superstructure and bridge scaled out would make the original ship around 333 meters long, like the version in Yamato 2199, but the original series version was suppose to be the original 1940s era battleship rebuilt....so it had to be made to be around to seem like it was 265 meters long).

 

I’m not entirely sure it was supposed to be nearly a kilometer long. The bridge superstructure still looks about the same size as the classic design - virtually identical in appearance - and the overall scale thereof could probably be derived from that. If I were to spitball a size I’d put it at probably around 500m to handle the extra turrets in the front and back. But I agree that the whole scaling question for these various Matsumoto designs is quite dodgy, along the lines of the ship seen in Matsumoto’s other project at the time, the Ultimate Time Sweeper Mahoroba, which looks more like the traditional WWII Yamato design but configured almost exactly like the original Dai Yamato - bigger, and with an extra row of guns. I’ve found very little about this, outside of a pair of manga books and a subsequent planned feature film back in 2013 that never materialized.

 

Supposedly there are references to Yamato in Matsumoto's recent manga called Captain Harlock: Dimensional Voyage. Which started coming out in 2014.

 

Just to be clear, I mean this one (it's a mashup with the Original Yamato OST, but it's the only footage that I can find...)

 

I always wondered why the Yamato doesn't have dorsal turrets... I mean... they seem useful...

 

My thoughts exactly. I always felt that the keel was highly vulnerable to attack from underneath, as evidenced by General Domel’s tactics. Adding dorsal armaments to increase overall firing arc would have made boatloads of good sense.

 

Best guess is the newer designs have too much equipment in the lower hull to make space for a turret. They did however add missile tubes to all the new battleship designs for Yamato 2199 and 2202, so the area isn't completely undefended. Add to this that the lower hull on Yamato has its thickest armor, while it looks like a nice target, its going to take a lot more to do damage there than on the top, where its covered with guns. We know in Yamato 2199 that this stuff must be very strong due to them crash landing on it a couple of times and the third bridge it still perfectly fine.

Add to this the wave motion shields in Yamato 2199 and 2202, and the ships well defended. Plus she can rotate fairly easily to bring the guns to target in any given direction (we've seen her roll in heavy anti-fleet combat to engage targets that are circling her).

 

Hell, I'm an anime and Yamato fan, and I hadn't heard of either the Manga or the Anime of it until I saw it in this thread. I had no idea they'd done this back in 2004.

 

Yeah, it's almost crazy. I can't find a decent plot description, no one ever fan-subbed it, even one of the best Yamato sites out there says almost nothing on the story. Yamato 2520 did less episodes and still you can find a ton of material about it.

It almost seems some kind of conspiracy!

 

Not a conspiracy, so much as licensing, I think. Yoshinobu Nishizaki had the full license rights to the Yamato property. Leiji Matsumoto didn't. So, as a result, anything the latter would do would, of course, either be completely eclipsed or discredited by the former. At its peak in the last decade, I liken this "battle" to the feud between Pink Floyd and Roger Waters. At least Waters got legal rights to "The Wall" when it was all said and done. Matsumoto basically got the shaft.

After the Nish died (following a short stint in jail for an extremely odd weapons charge) I have no idea if Matsumoto could have a legitimate claim going forward. Since others seem to have taken up the mantle (I think Nish's son may have been one of them, at least for 2199), I doubt Matsumoto will ever be directly associated with the IP ever again.