Steve H wrote:So then, the central question regarding the 1974 Yamato.
When the World Government (un-named but clearly implied) and the Earth Defense Command (named) decided to take on what may well have been a suicide mission to Iscandar, the understanding was "If things continue exactly the same as now, Mankind will be extinct in just one Earth year." This was a pretty huge gamble for the EDC. What if the Gamilas increased the bombing? What if they deployed a new, more devastating weapon (the Super Giant Missile as one example)? What if they decided on a physical invasion? All of these must have been considered, I would hope, because all those assumptions are completely logical in terms of any kind of warfare.
The more poignant question is, if they had all these missiles, if they were so devastating and so numerous (we see at least half a dozen of them, if not more, in Episode 7 and then there was the one they launched at the
Yamato itself), then why didn't they use them on the Earth already, aside from Dessler having some sort of plans for the planet (such as it becoming the new Gamilas homeworld) or intending to maximise the pain the people of Earth went through?
I think the EDC realised that the only hope for the Earth's (and certainly humanity's) long-term future was to send
Yamato to Iscandar to retrieve the Cosmo Cleaner D, as even with
Yamato they wouldn't have had a chance of fending off a full-scale invasion. I think it's safe to assume that planet bombing was all, for whatever reason, that Gamilas was prepared to spend attacking Earth over the years that it had been (which was several, since Kodai was extremely young when his parents died in a bombing and Japan was one of the last places on Earth to be attacked).
Steve H wrote:The EDC clearly had no idea on the logistics train that fed the (then-unknown) Gamilas Base on Pluto. They didn't know if the Planet Bombs were imported from outside the Solar System or (more logically) mined and created using the Oort cloud and asteroid belt debris. Simple orbital mechanics would show the 'back track' but there's no real way to assign a launch point. 1974 Yamato doesn't specify that the Planet Bombs come from Pluto, just somewhere outside the orbit of Mars. Episode 7, a Planet Bomb passes Yamato and they ASSUME a base on Pluto sending them off. And so on from there.
It's the only reasonable assumption that can be made, since knowledge in 1974 of the outer solar system was very limited. Charon (the first satellite of Pluto to be found) would not be discovered until 1978 and the Kuiper Belt was not discovered until 1992. The Oort Cloud is thought to cover an area from between 2,000 and 5,000 AU out to 50,000 AU (almost a light year) away from the Sun, so it would be an impractical location to make planet bombs as the distance would be too great unless you had some way of transporting them at superluminal speeds (as a reference, Pluto is only 48 AU from the Sun, so we're roughly talking 50 times the distance). Aside from that, the Oort Cloud is believed to be made up largely of ices made from ammonia, water, and methane (it's assumed to be the source of long-period comets), and thus would not be suitable for making planet bombs (assuming that original series planet bombs are not completely artificial constructs manufactured by Gamilas, which I'm more inclined to believe).
[As a side note: Aside from Charon, no futher moons of Pluto would be discovered until 2005 when Nix and Hydra were discovered and named; two more, Kerberos (2011) and Styx (July 2012) were also discovered (as nothing more than a footnote, Nix and Hydra were seen on the tactical map in the Operations Planning/Situation Room in Episode 5 of
2199, but Kerberos and Styx were not, which suggests that they were discovered too late for them to make an impact in
2199's production).]
It should be noted, that while I can't tell for certain whether
Space Battleship Yamato's narration mentions it or not (as I don't speak Japanese, and my only copy of the oriignal
Yamato is raw Japanese Blu-Ray),
Star Blazers most certainly
does say that Pluto was where the planet bombs were launched from (albeit unbeknownst to the Star Force). Of all the things that are lost in translation, I'd be very surprised if that was one of them. If that's not where the planet bombs are launched from, then it makes little sense for
Yamato to divert from its course and attack the Pluto base.
I was going to discuss the other parts of your argument, but it's nearly 2:00AM here and I need sleep. I'll pick it up tomorrow.