HOW DOES PROTOCULTURE POWER MECHA IN ROBOTECH?
This is never comprehensively answered in the show. All books and comics written after the McKinney novelizations imply that protoculture is some sort of fluid that runs throughout the mecha (and the traces of it in the Zentraedi). This idea seems to be originally McKinney’s. The earliest comprehensive description of what protoculture actually does in the generation of power is in Comico’s _Robotech: The Graphic Novel_. Zor says, “But look at these seeds! The miracle of clean energy — It never fails to astound me. How each seed strives to divide — but when placed in a pressurized chamber, is arrested in mid-division… so long as the pressure is precisely maintained, the seed radiates heat, which we ultimately to energy.” Since Carl Macek worked closely with the author on the graphic novel (unlike the novelizations, where Macek has implied McKinney was on his own), we can take this as the closest to the original conception.