Star Blazers: Space Battleship Yamato 3199 Episode 15
Star Blazers: Space Battleship Yamato 3199 Episode 15: The Zero Point Directive The Intriguing Teaser In the deepest recesses of the cosmos, where the ghosts of Gatlantis still cling to the vacuum and the echoes of Garmillas ambition reverberate, the Yamato faces its most chilling ethical dilemma yet.
This is not a battle against fleets, but a calculated, psychological war waged by an enemy that has mastered invisibility.
A vast, overwhelming force lies just beyond the limit of perception, cloaked by a technology far superior to anything the crew has ever encountered.
Captain Kodai is forced to choose: unleash the devastating, world-shattering power of the Wave Motion Gun (WMG) on an empty sector and risk violating the sacred Cosmo-Neutrality Accord and his own soul, or stand paralyzed as the phantom enemy prepares its final, crippling strike.
The survival of the entire Terron fleet hinges on a single, impossible gamble: trust a ghost from the past to save their future.
Important Characters: Roles and Motivations Character Role in Episode 15 Motivation & Key Conflict Captain Susumu Kodai Captain of the Yamato Conflict of Conscience: Kodai carries the weight of humanity's survival and the legacy of Captain Okita.
His motivation is to win without compromising the moral principles that define the Yamato's mission.
He desperately seeks a non-WMG solution to the overwhelming threat, struggling against the pragmatic, desperate calls of his crew to fire the ultimate weapon.
Yuki Mori Chief Navigator/Tactician The Iscandarian Link: Yuki is pivotal in calculating the enemy's cloaked attack vectors and optimizing Yamato's evasive maneuvers.
Her underlying motivation is fueled by her mysterious connection to Starsha and Iscandar.
A growing, latent sense of precognition regarding the enemy's movements drives her tactical decisions, suggesting an innate, untapped power is beginning to surface.
Shiro Sanada Chief Engineer & Science Officer Technological Breakthrough: Sanada is driven by scientific duty and the need to equalize the tactical advantage.
His primary motivation is to rapidly invent and deploy a counter-measure to the enemy's cloaking technology, even if it means sacrificing critical, non-redundant ship systems.
He is the voice of cold, hard logic, arguing for calculated risk.
Saburo Kato Black Tiger Squad Leader Air Wing Sacrifice: Kato is the fiery, dedicated wing leader.
He motivates his pilots to undertake near-suicidal scouting missions into the 'invisible' zone, driven by a deep loyalty to Kodai and the need to provide any shred of tactical data, knowing full well they might be flying into certain, invisible death.
Garmillas Commodore Volke Mysterious Fleet Commander The Last Loyal Zealot: The antagonist of this episode, Volke is a fanatical former Garmillas commander and Dessler loyalist, now commanding a remnant fleet of Gatlantean-modified vessels.
His motivation is pure, nihilistic revenge against Terron (Earth) for the perceived collapse of the Garmillas Empire.
He seeks to prove the superiority of combined Gatlantean-Garmillas technology, using the cloaking field as his ultimate trap.
Important Scenes in Sequence 1.
The Veil of Oblivion (Deployment) The Yamato, pushing toward the Galactic center, drops out of Warp near the 'Cemetery of Heroes', a desolate asteroid field known for Gatlantean skirmishes.
A sudden, deep-spectrum energy drain hits the ship.
All external radar, optical sensors, and warp indicators go black.
The bridge is plunged into crisis as Sanada confirms: they are surrounded by an unknown, immensely powerful, active cloaking field.
Tactical displays show dozens of ghost contacts moving at combat speed, yet there is nothing visually or electronically detectable.
The crew is fighting an enemy that literally does not exist to their senses.
Kodai issues the first critical order: maximum silent running and immediate power reallocation to internal systems, knowing evasion is impossible in a three-dimensional blind spot.
2.
Kato’s Gambit (Sacrifice) With no visual confirmation, Kato volunteers his Black Tiger Squadron for a desperate, low-altitude scouting run through the 'ghost' fleet.
Their mission: use their cockpit windows and raw human sight to detect distortions in the vacuum that might betray the cloaking effect.
This harrowing sequence is visually stunning pilots weaving through invisible energy barriers, dodging phantom torpedo trails, and watching as their wingmen suddenly explode into debris with no visible assailant.
Kato, surviving a near-miss, captures a split-second energy signature a Gravimetric Distortion Fluctuation and barely transmits the data before the invisible ships converge on his position, forcing him to warp-jump out of the sector with catastrophic engine damage.
3.
The Analyzer Revelation (Calculation) The faint data packet from Kato reaches the Yamato.
Analyzer and Sanada frantically analyze the fluctuation.
They realize the cloaking field is not optical, but temporal it slightly shifts the enemy ships out of phase with Terron reality, making them undetectable.
Sanada proposes a terrifying counter-measure: By collapsing the Yamato's primary Astrometric Sensor Array (a multi-trillion dollar piece of equipment and the ship's most sophisticated navigational tool) and funneling its entire power capacity into an inverted, counter-phase gravimetric pulse, they could briefly and violently rip the enemy fleet back into normal space.
This would instantly reveal their position, but leave Yamato permanently blind to long-range navigation.
Kodai must choose between sight and survival.
4.
Yuki's Intuition and the WMG Directive (Climax) Kodai is cornered.
The invisible fleet begins their attack sequence a 'zero-point' saturation missile barrage that will obliterate Yamato.
Yuki Mori, staring blankly at the inactive tactical screen, suddenly screams, “Port, 3 degrees, NOW!” Kodai trusts her, and the ship performs a hyper-specific, near-impossible evasion.
Yuki reveals a chilling certainty: she knows the enemy's attack pattern, almost feeling it in her mind.
This is the moment of truth.
Kodai rejects Sanada's sensor sacrifice plan, and instead chooses to trust Yuki’s premonition.
He orders a full charge of the Wave Motion Gun, but not to fire at the enemy.
He prepares to fire a Wave Motion Shell a massive energy burst intended to saturate a wide-angle sector, hoping the WMG’s raw energy will briefly overpower and destabilize the temporal cloaking field, forcing the enemy to decloak themselves just long enough for the main guns to acquire a lock.
5.
The Moment of Truth (Action) The Wave Motion Shell fires.
It is a terrifying, controlled detonation of planet-destroying energy, not aimed at an object, but at a tactical area.
The shockwave hits the 'ghost' sector.
For three agonizing seconds, the sky lights up, revealing Commodore Volke's heavily modified, Gatlantean-hybrid fleet dozens of ships frozen mid-attack.
The Yamato's main shock cannons roar, acquiring and devastating the exposed enemy.
Volke's flagship, caught in the shell's fallout, is instantly vaporized.
The battle ends in a flash, the silence that follows louder than the preceding chaos.
The Dramatic Ending and Twist As the residual energy from the Wave Motion Shell clears, the Yamato recovers a single, perfectly preserved, non-Terron artifact floating in the debris cloud of Volke’s flagship.
It is a large, crystal Garmillas Data Core, meticulously shielding a secondary, smaller object an Iscandarian Archive Shard.
The Dramatic Ending: Kodai and Sanada discover that Commodore Volke's desperation was not just for revenge.
The Data Core reveals Volke was leading the remnants of the Garmillas military not to destroy Terron, but to shield and transport the Archive Shard to a safe point, away from the prying eyes of the new Deslar regime and the remaining Gatlantean threats.
Volke had intended to use the cloaking technology to hide the relic, not to kill the Yamato.
The final, destroyed fleet were desperate protectors, not aggressors.
Kodai's decision to use the WMG, though tactically successful, inadvertently destroyed the very fleet trying to safeguard an invaluable Iscandarian secret.
The Twist: The Zero Point Directive When the Iscandarian Archive Shard is activated, it doesn't contain a message of peace or blueprints for repair.
Instead, it projects a single, chilling set of schematics the original Iscandarian design for the Wave Motion Engine.
Next to the plans are the codified words: “The Zero Point Directive.
” Sanada translates the ancient Iscandarian text: the Wave Motion Engine was not created as a drive or a weapon, but as a last-resort temporal displacement device, designed to instantly and completely wipe all traces of a corrupted civilization from the timeline by displacing their physical matter to the moment of the universe's creation (Zero Point).
The WMG, in its pure form, is not merely a super-weapon; it is an instrument of cosmic erasure.
The shard ends with a single message, directed at any successor race that inherits the technology: “She who carries the blood of Iscandar must never initiate the Zero Point.
