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Macross Δ (Delta) Movie Gekijō no Walkūre (Passionate Walkure)


no3Ljm

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Frankly, I wanted more of the Knights to die. Herman should have died early on. One of the twins should have bought the apple orchard. Bogue should have been humiliated by Mirage-“by-the-book”-Jenius. More redshirts should also have died on-screen. But that’s my thought. 

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5 hours ago, azrael said:

Frankly, I wanted more of the Knights to die. Herman should have died early on. One of the twins should have bought the apple orchard. Bogue should have been humiliated by Mirage-“by-the-book”-Jenius. More redshirts should also have died on-screen. But that’s my thought. 

Frankly, I'm a bit miffed by the treatment Mirage got. She's a Jenius. So she starts out as a by the book pilot, very little improv, just enough to be slightly better than average, per her lineage. She should have gotten the loosen up lecture sooner and had more time to blossom, and show everyone that her name isn't just an accident of birth. But she got outshined by Hayate, and that's not cool. Also, I agree that Mirage should have been handing Bogue's ass to him on a platter for the whole show.

More CF's did need to bite it, and Herman should have been given some pineapple salad. 

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I also don't count Qasim's death as a "kill" since he died by "flying himself to death". Keith and Eyeglasses-fetish guy (yeah, I don't remember his name) died in a murder-suicide. Essentially, only 1 Knight was KIA on-screen and it was a redshirt.

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9 minutes ago, azrael said:

I also don't count Qasim's death as a "kill" since he died by "flying himself to death". Keith and Eyeglasses-fetish guy (yeah, I don't remember his name) died in a murder-suicide. Essentially, only 1 Knight was KIA on-screen and it was a redshirt.

I dunno, I'd call Qasim's death an incident of friendly fire... his rune was supercharged by the Song of the Wind to the extent that exerting himself caused him to age super-rapidly and die in the cockpit.  It nearly killed Hermann too.  Basically, Heinz was the actual killer of Qasim.

Keith and Roid, well, that's definitely an attempt at atonement equals death by Keith.

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8 hours ago, azrael said:

I also don't count Qasim's death as a "kill" since he died by "flying himself to death". Keith and Eyeglasses-fetish guy (yeah, I don't remember his name) died in a murder-suicide. Essentially, only 1 Knight was KIA on-screen and it was a redshirt.

Yeah, the whole symbolism of Siegfrieds slay the Drakens was a complete bust. 

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What happens when executives call the shots. They weren’t wrong, Walküre got the yen rolling in as it was designed to do, but this wasn’t the Macross show the first 12 episodes had promised. 

Edited by Sildani
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4 hours ago, SMS007 said:

Yeah, the whole symbolism of Siegfrieds slay the Drakens was a complete bust. 

Assuming that was the intention to begin with.  Most of us assumed that the show was going to do some heavy referencing of Ring of the Nibelung, but they never did even once.  Kind of a waste of an opportunity, IMO.

 

2 hours ago, Sildani said:

What happens when executives call the shots. They weren’t wrong, Walküre got the yen rolling in as it was designed to do, but this wasn’t the Macross show the first 12 episodes had promised. 

It wasn't even the show the first three episodes promised... given how little transformation was used, you could mistake it for a crossover between Ace Combat and Pretty Cure fairly easily.  Maybe even Ace Combat 3, since the Drakens don't use normal canopies.

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35 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Assuming that was the intention to begin with.  Most of us assumed that the show was going to do some heavy referencing of Ring of the Nibelung, but they never did even once.  Kind of a waste of an opportunity, IMO.

I guess that's yet another wasted opportunity to add the pile of Delta let us down on the setup yet again. 

Now I personally don't always need the symbolism of Western dragons as monsters who need to be annihilated; I rather enjoy a share of Eastern-style works featuring ryū as benevolent kami. But here we have a whole TV anime following up on the naming precedents in Macross 30 and expanding that into Siegfried versus Drakens. And the bloodstained killers who operate the Drakens basically get away scot-free. Count me under unimpressed. 

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58 minutes ago, SMS007 said:

And the bloodstained killers who operate the Drakens basically get away scot-free.

I suppose it's just like real life then, though that isn't a very satisfying story.  Though it is never explicitly shown they've been punished, Seto pointed out that Windmere is effed.  Politically and Economically.  Those guys who weren't punished are going home to a place that's an absolute mess.  And the rest of the galaxy was freed from mind-control.  So there was a victory and punishment there, just not such a clear cut Hollywood style one.

Edited by Mommar
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1 hour ago, SMS007 said:

I guess that's yet another wasted opportunity to add the pile of Delta let us down on the setup yet again. [...]

But here we have a whole TV anime following up on the naming precedents in Macross 30 and expanding that into Siegfried versus Drakens. And the bloodstained killers who operate the Drakens basically get away scot-free. Count me under unimpressed. 

Every subsequent Macross story tends to sneak a few more details into the background timeline as it goes... maybe the next series'll throw in something about the federal NUNS showing up tardy to the party and shelling Windermere IV into a cinder?

Either way, I'd argue the Kingdom of the Wind basically punished themselves if you look at it.  They sent a good chunk of their youth away to fight a war under false pretenses, and an awful lot of 'em ended up dead at the hands of the local NUNS during the big counterattack.  Their royal family has only one remaining heir left and he's a bedridden invalid due to his own father's machinations, with the illegitimate prince having been reduced to nothing heavier than a cough in the destruction of a Protoculture shrine on Ragna... so their autocratic government's about to collapse.  Their economy will probably collapse first, since Windermere IV's economy was built on agriculture and their main export of foodstuffs is in a zero-demand situation thanks to being tainted with compounds that are the cause of Var syndrome.

Don't get me wrong, Macross Delta had basically no closure to the actual conflict in the series... but it's a safe bet Windermere IV is about to have a VERY bad time as a result of their bad choices, just offscreen.  Another five, ten years of time in-universe and the lack of technical aid from the Epsilon Foundation will probably leave the Aerial Knights unable to interrupt a small tea party in the Brisingr Alliance, let alone actually cause trouble.

Edited by Seto Kaiba
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These Windermereans are the result of an extremely lazy effort desingning villains. 

They all live in villages but can afford intergalactic war against a colonizing fleet (they get help from protoculture war machines, but still).

They want to free the galaxy from human tyranny by massive killing innocents.

Their army is always the 6 men squad, an old king, a guy with glasses... and a kid. Really!? 

After 26 episodes they give us the same ending as frontier... OMG.

If that was not enough, from 6 valks we get just 1 custom and guess what... its pilot gets killed.

Its so sad how they quickly went from cool to "meh" to disappointing.

 

 

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3 minutes ago, RealJayDee said:

These Windermereans are the result of an extremely lazy effort desingning villains. 

I wouldn't go quite that far... 

 

3 minutes ago, RealJayDee said:

They all live in villages but can afford intergalactic war against a colonizing fleet (they get help from protoculture war machines, but still).

So, a few points here:

  • They do, in fact, have cities.  We see their capital city of Darwent several times in the series, and one of their main reasons for hating the New UN Government so passionately is that the New UN Spacy did a number on several Windermerean cities during the 2060 war where the Kingdom of the Wind seceded from the New UN Government.  The city of Sparrowhead took quite a beating in a bombing, and Hayate's dad wiped the city of Carlyle right off the planet with a dimensional warhead.
     
  • You forgot that Windermere IV's Kingdom of the Wind had the backing of the Epsilon Foundation, an interstellar mega-conglomerate that sold them ships, the Sv-262 Draken III fighters developed by its subsidiary Dian Cecht, various other weapons, and also provided the technological aid necessary to reconstruct the Sigur Valens and render their Protoculture ruins workable.
     
  • Windermere IV may be an economically underdeveloped world with a largely agrarian society, but it's noted as being especially rich in one invaluable rare commodity... fold quartz.  One of the root causes of Windermere's war of secession against the New UN Government was that the government's restrictions on trade in fold quartz (laws that were enacted to prevent the proliferation of dimensional warheads) left the mining of fold quartz in New UN Government control and prevented Windermere from using the immense wealth represented by those caches of fold quartz to get rich quick.  Being that fold quartz is an essential component of inertia store converters and in many other technologies can improve performance over synthetic alternatives (e.g. fold systems), it's a safe bet Windermere IV financed its war by paying Epsilon in fold quartz.  (More or less the equivalent of real-world conflict diamonds, but even more valuable.)

 

 

3 minutes ago, RealJayDee said:

They want to free the galaxy from human tyranny by massive killing innocents.

They want to free the Brisingr globular cluster from what they see as human tyranny... since they had serious issues with how humans rode roughshod over their government when they were a New UN Government member world.  They expected (somewhat wrongly, as it turned out) that the other worlds in the cluster would feel the same.  (Macross Delta Gaiden: The Black-Winged White Knight shows this in more detail, almost to the extent of "villain had a point", though it wasn't helped that rational/sane New UN Forces actions intended to prevent Var syndrome from becoming a thing were undertaken under the guise of MASSIVE dickishness on the part of the NUNS garrison, like "accidentally" torching the Eber-hardt family's orchards during exercises.)

 

 

3 minutes ago, RealJayDee said:

Their army is always the 6 men squad, an old king, a guy with glasses... and a kid. Really!? 

Their most elite unit... not their entire army.  We see on numerous occasions that they have plenty of ships, several of which are carriers.  The Aerial Knights we see are basically their top ace's personal unit, like an equivalent of Baron Manfred von Richthofen's so-called "Flying Circus" (Jagdgeschwader 1).

 

 

3 minutes ago, RealJayDee said:

After 26 episodes they give us the same ending as frontier... OMG.

Now THAT, I'll grant you, was monstrously lazy... for Roid's plot to be precisely the same plot as Grace O'Connor's in Macross Frontier was just bad writing.

 

 

3 minutes ago, RealJayDee said:

If that was not enough, from 6 valks we get just 1 custom and guess what... its pilot gets killed.

Strictly speaking, there are actually five custom VFs in the series... the five VF-31 Siegfried units used by Delta Flight.

The Siegfried is an aftermarket modification of the Surya Aerospace VF-31A Kairos by the Xaos Valkyrie Works.  A summary of what modifications go into converting a Kairos into a Siegfried is available here.

Keith's Sv-262Hs Draken III is not a custom machine, but rather is a production command variant like the VF-1S.

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Are there any worlds in the Brisingr Cluster actually populated by native sentient species? Are Windermere, Ragna, and Voldor the only ones?

I fail to feel any sympathy for the Wind regime for suspending the sovereignty of millions of humans (and Zentradi and Ragnans and Voldorians) and expecting good things to happen. 

Edited by SMS007
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2 hours ago, SMS007 said:

Are there any worlds in the Brisingr Cluster actually populated by native sentient species? Are Windermere, Ragna, and Voldor the only ones?

Thus far, Ragna, Voldor, and Windermere IV are the only ones we know about.

Mind you, the populations of those worlds and natives who've emigrated to other planets in the cluster probably make up the majority of the Brisingr cluster's 8 billion inhabitants.  I don't believe it's been revealed how advanced Ragna and Voldor were when first contact was made, but when SDF-5 Megaroad-04 found Windermere IV in 2027 the natives had the equivalent of at least a late medieval or Enlightenment era civilization.  It's actually kind of amazing that Windermere IV's feudal absolute monarchy was able to adapt so readily to a complete upending of its entire worldview and become a semi-functioning member of an interstellar government.  They went from berks on giant birds waving bits of sharp metal at each other over control of small parcels of land to defending their solar system and their neighbors using hypersonic SSTO stealth aerospace variable fighters powered by fold effect-driven thermonuclear fusion engines without any intermediate steps and in the space of barely one generation. 

To put the cherry on that sundae of existential horror, the sudden imposition of realities like the galaxy being crawling with aliens who are all significantly more advanced and longer lived than your own people, who could end your entire civilization with relatively little effort, and who probably weren't all that shy about undermining several other bastions of your socio-political stability like commerce and religion with advanced technology and science... it can't have been an easy or relaxing time for the native Windermereans.  Just telling the truth about the Zentradi Army and the threat it poses to the galaxy could start a planet-wide panic.  It really makes you appreciate why the UFP in Star Trek has the prime directive, and makes you wonder why the New UN Government doesn't have a similar policy.

Zola appears to be the planet that was the farthest along in its development when it was discovered by the New UN Government's emigrant fleets.  The Zolans had already achieved their own pre-spaceflight industrial era agrarian civilization comparable to the first half of the 20th century when their planet was discovered and the planet became a member of the New UN Government.  They seem to be incredibly chill with the whole thing, and even in the late 2040s hadn't let it affect their culture much.

 

2 hours ago, SMS007 said:

I fail to feel any sympathy for the Wind regime for suspending the sovereignty of millions of humans (and Zentradi and Ragnans and Voldorians) and expecting good things to happen. 

Without reading Macross Delta Gaiden: the Black-Winged White Knight it's REALLY hard to sympathize with Windermere at all... why the writers felt compelled to leave all the facts of the raw deal Windermere IV had under the New UN Government in a manga is beyond me.  

Just two chapters is enough to take Bogue from "that boy ain't right" to "I'm not surprised he has anger management issues, life has been elephant-making-love-to-a-cat ROUGH on him."

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1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Without reading Macross Delta Gaiden: the Black-Winged White Knight it's REALLY hard to sympathize with Windermere at all... why the writers felt compelled to leave all the facts of the raw deal Windermere IV had under the New UN Government in a manga is beyond me.  

Just two chapters is enough to take Bogue from "that boy ain't right" to "I'm not surprised he has anger management issues, life has been elephant-making-love-to-a-cat ROUGH on him.

I think we'd all appreciate a summary of that sometime.

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12 hours ago, Mommar said:

I think we'd all appreciate a summary of that sometime.

About half of it has been translated, that I know of.

I haven't actually got 'round to getting the second volume that depicts the events on Windermere after the destruction of Carlyle yet.

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On 13/11/2017 at 2:19 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

I wouldn't go quite that far... 

 

So, a few points here:

  • They do, in fact, have cities.  We see their capital city of Darwent several times in the series, and one of their main reasons for hating the New UN Government so passionately is that the New UN Spacy did a number on several Windermerean cities during the 2060 war where the Kingdom of the Wind seceded from the New UN Government.  The city of Sparrowhead took quite a beating in a bombing, and Hayate's dad wiped the city of Carlyle right off the planet with a dimensional warhead.
     
  • You forgot that Windermere IV's Kingdom of the Wind had the backing of the Epsilon Foundation, an interstellar mega-conglomerate that sold them ships, the Sv-262 Draken III fighters developed by its subsidiary Dian Cecht, various other weapons, and also provided the technological aid necessary to reconstruct the Sigur Valens and render their Protoculture ruins workable.
     
  • Windermere IV may be an economically underdeveloped world with a largely agrarian society, but it's noted as being especially rich in one invaluable rare commodity... fold quartz.  One of the root causes of Windermere's war of secession against the New UN Government was that the government's restrictions on trade in fold quartz (laws that were enacted to prevent the proliferation of dimensional warheads) left the mining of fold quartz in New UN Government control and prevented Windermere from using the immense wealth represented by those caches of fold quartz to get rich quick.  Being that fold quartz is an essential component of inertia store converters and in many other technologies can improve performance over synthetic alternatives (e.g. fold systems), it's a safe bet Windermere IV financed its war by paying Epsilon in fold quartz.  (More or less the equivalent of real-world conflict diamonds, but even more valuable.)

 

 

They want to free the Brisingr globular cluster from what they see as human tyranny... since they had serious issues with how humans rode roughshod over their government when they were a New UN Government member world.  They expected (somewhat wrongly, as it turned out) that the other worlds in the cluster would feel the same.  (Macross Delta Gaiden: The Black-Winged White Knight shows this in more detail, almost to the extent of "villain had a point", though it wasn't helped that rational/sane New UN Forces actions intended to prevent Var syndrome from becoming a thing were undertaken under the guise of MASSIVE dickishness on the part of the NUNS garrison, like "accidentally" torching the Eber-hardt family's orchards during exercises.)

 

 

Their most elite unit... not their entire army.  We see on numerous occasions that they have plenty of ships, several of which are carriers.  The Aerial Knights we see are basically their top ace's personal unit, like an equivalent of Baron Manfred von Richthofen's so-called "Flying Circus" (Jagdgeschwader 1).

 

 

Now THAT, I'll grant you, was monstrously lazy... for Roid's plot to be precisely the same plot as Grace O'Connor's in Macross Frontier was just bad writing.

 

 

Strictly speaking, there are actually five custom VFs in the series... the five VF-31 Siegfried units used by Delta Flight.

The Siegfried is an aftermarket modification of the Surya Aerospace VF-31A Kairos by the Xaos Valkyrie Works.  A summary of what modifications go into converting a Kairos into a Siegfried is available here.

Keith's Sv-262Hs Draken III is not a custom machine, but rather is a production command variant like the VF-1S.

Wow! I was much unaware of most about the windermereans. I'll have to rewatch and pay more attention about their background. Thanks for the additional info.

But still I find it difficult to sympathize with their cause and means.

Causing secretly innocents "to VAR" and plan civilian attacks... does not sound very "knightly" or rightgeous.

Anyway, I'm open to reconsider.

It would be great the movie to deal the conflict fully from the windermere side.

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And the whole series ends with no comment on the still-comatose inhabitants of Al Shahal. Sure Walküre will probably handle that but of course the Windermereans will get away scot-free with that too. And the whole time the series stupidly pretends no one could have actually died in that incident because they were affected in the middle of operating hazardous equipment at the time. 

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2 hours ago, SMS007 said:

And the whole series ends with no comment on the still-comatose inhabitants of Al Shahal. Sure Walküre will probably handle that but of course the Windermereans will get away scot-free with that too. And the whole time the series stupidly pretends no one could have actually died in that incident because they were affected in the middle of operating hazardous equipment at the time. 

I'd like to believe that they woke up from that before the series ended and were understandably pissed.

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20 hours ago, RealJayDee said:

Wow! I was much unaware of most about the windermereans. I'll have to rewatch and pay more attention about their background. Thanks for the additional info.

But still I find it difficult to sympathize with their cause and means.

It would have been helpful if the show's creators hadn't compartmentalized a lot of Windermere's backstory in a manga... they're not xenophobic by nature, but they got such a raw deal under the New UN Government that it really pushed them to the breaking point.

 

20 hours ago, RealJayDee said:

Causing secretly innocents "to VAR" and plan civilian attacks... does not sound very "knightly" or rightgeous.

Yeah, kind of a sleazy thing to do... but they probably saw it as the only option since their planet has a relatively small population, their people don't live long, and fighting fair they had basically zero chance of victory over even the local New UN Forces thanks to their greater numbers.

 

 

4 hours ago, SMS007 said:

And the whole series ends with no comment on the still-comatose inhabitants of Al Shahal. Sure Walküre will probably handle that but of course the Windermereans will get away scot-free with that too. And the whole time the series stupidly pretends no one could have actually died in that incident because they were affected in the middle of operating hazardous equipment at the time. 

I'd expect that the entire Brisingr cluster is going to be VERY annoyed with Windermere IV... and at the very least, it'll probably result in a full-on trade embargo against them that will annihilate what's left of their economy.  Once the NUNS gets its act together, a retaliatory strike isn't out of the question.

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I wonder if Gekijō no Walküre and the new TV anime will form a kind of scenario like Plus and with the storytelling. Plus debuted the experimental YF-19 and YF-21 of 2040, and then gave us the production model VF-19 and VF-22 of 2045/2046. And as this new TV anime is coming only 2 years after Δ, reuse of the animation elements seems probable.

Now somewhere the upcoming TV anime will surely debut a VF-35 in commemoration of the 35th anniversary of Macross. A new sub-franchise has to have some new signature for itself. Gekijō no Walküre seems a logical place to debut a YF-35 in anticipation, but that's probably too much of a longshot hope.

I wonder if such a VF-35 in the new series will be another derivative of the YF-24. 

Edited by SMS007
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1 hour ago, Focslain said:

To get a new Valk in the movie? Yeah long shot, however in the next series that is a more likely place. Would be neat to have it listed as a VF-35 (or YF-35) as a node to the series age and just keep it up for future runs.

It looks kind of rushed... but it feels bandai has been influencing macross to design as many new valks as possible  Yf 29, vf 19 advance, yf 30 just to sell, sell, sell.

Maybe we wont have a new valk but a modded vf 31...

Those guys hunger for our money and wallets that im sure they will release something... even a quick repaint.

 

 

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5 hours ago, Focslain said:

To get a new Valk in the movie? Yeah long shot, however in the next series that is a more likely place. Would be neat to have it listed as a VF-35 (or YF-35) as a node to the series age and just keep it up for future runs.

I'd like to see them stop doing that.  It's a big galaxy, but by 2067 the majority of galactic governments have already started to transition to 5th Generation VFs.  The Brisingr Alliance was a slow child in that crowd with its 5th Gen VF not coming into service in 2069-2070.  Unless Kawamori drags the next series forward several decades, it won't make a ton of sense to add new VFs again.

 

 

3 hours ago, RealJayDee said:

It looks kind of rushed... but it feels bandai has been influencing macross to design as many new valks as possible  Yf 29, vf 19 advance, yf 30 just to sell, sell, sell.

Nah, the YF-29 is basically a reuse of a design Kawamori did almost ten years before... the SW-XA II Schneegans.  The YF-30 Chronos wasn't a "throw it in" either, it was a new VF for a main character in a canon videogame.

If anything, what Bandai's leaning on them to do is throw in tons of different character variant paintjobs so they can endlessly redeco the same handful of molds, like seven different VF-31s (A, C, E, F, J, S, J Custom), two Sv-262 variants each of which has two official paintjobs (Ba and Hs, in green and white), and another VF-171.

 

3 hours ago, RealJayDee said:

Maybe we wont have a new valk but a modded vf 31...

That's what the Siegfrieds are... modded versions of the VF-31A Kairos.

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58 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

That's what the Siegfrieds are... modded versions of the VF-31A Kairos.

I think what RealJayDee means is a further evolution of what we already got onscreen in Δ. After all, the Siegfrieds in real-life terms are the 31s in general knowledge.

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7 minutes ago, Sildani said:

No, seriously, can I have meow  catgirl piloted VF-171 already?!

Well, you can have a catboy-piloted one... but we'll see if the novelization or manga humor you.

 

Just now, SMS007 said:

I think what RealJayDee means is a further evolution of what we already got onscreen in Δ. After all, the Siegfrieds in real-life terms are the 31s in general knowledge.

I dunno 'bout "general knowledge" there... I mean, every bloody model kit and DX and so on does mention that the Siegfrieds are ace custom VF-31s rather than the production unit.

Can't help but think that a further evolution of the VF-31 would be an even cheaper version than the VF-31A... VF-30&2/3 Kairos Minus?  

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16 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

I dunno 'bout "general knowledge" there... I mean, every bloody model kit and DX and so on does mention that the Siegfrieds are ace custom VF-31s rather than the production unit.

Can't help but think that a further evolution of the VF-31 would be an even cheaper version than the VF-31A... VF-30&2/3 Kairos Minus?  

Well I concede that this isn't technically correct terminology, but think about it. Ask a random average Macross fan what an average VF-31 looks like. Are they going to think of the generic 31A model that we could barely see close-up in Δ,  or will they think of the five signature Siegfrieds spotlighted in all Δ material?

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26 minutes ago, SMS007 said:

Well I concede that this isn't technically correct terminology, but think about it. Ask a random average Macross fan what an average VF-31 looks like. Are they going to think of the generic 31A model that we could barely see close-up in Δ,  or will they think of the five signature Siegfrieds spotlighted in all Δ material?

Depends if they're mecha-oriented fans like us, or the more typical Delta fan who'd probably ask if you'd hit your head if you said it was a mecha series.

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What’s the point of the R? In reality, an R designation and grotesquely long wings mean high altitude long range recon. But the 31 is a damn SSTO spacecraft already with nigh-unlimited range anyway.  Again, what’s the point?

 

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11 hours ago, SMS007 said:

Ah, the things that never get animated. 

Eh... that's not really "things that never [got] animated", it's more along the lines of "things that the GA Graphic staff came up with on their own because they needed to pad a badly-written book like a menstruating firehose so it'd reach the 128 pages management committed to".1

EDIT: Don't get me wrong here, the problems with the VF-31 Master File are entirely on the staff that wrote the book, not the staff of the show.  They had information and chose not to use it, or to contradict it, for reasons that aren't clear.

With a few exceptions in the earlier books, the original variants in Variable Fighter Master File aren't based on anything official.  Several of them even straight-up contradict official series materials from various Macross shows.2  They're basically throw-it-in filler intended to inflate page count and add a bit of visual diversity to what would otherwise be a realistically samey Variants section where all the variants look almost identical.  The variants that ARE official or at least based on material in official publications fall into three categories: ones nicked from other sources whole cloth3, ones which are straight-up official4, and ones which are current-model versions of things that existed for a previous VF model.5  The only book that really stayed away from it was the VF-0 book, which covered only the official five variants in any depth... though it did add one or two intermediate variants between the F-14A+ and VF-0A in passing.

 

 

4 hours ago, Sildani said:

What’s the point of the R? In reality, an R designation and grotesquely long wings mean high altitude long range recon. But the 31 is a damn SSTO spacecraft already with nigh-unlimited range anyway.  Again, what’s the point?

There are a fair few variants in Master File that don't make a ton of sense... again, because they're throw-it-in filler meant to add visual interest and pad page count.  What use is a VF-25 biplane, for instance?  Or a VF-19 for ground attack with a tiny little chin turret when it's already got much more powerful beam guns and a rotary gunpod?

 

 

1 hour ago, Valkyrie Driver said:

I'm confused as to the purpose of any variant that isn't the Kairos or the Siegfried...  What point to the 31JW's absurdly long canards serve? 

That one, the book at least explains in a way that doesn't make you wonder if the writer spent the previous hour sampling everything in the nurse's medicine cabinet... some of the others, not so much.

 

 

Spoiler

1. SoftBank intern: "Thank you for hiring me, sir!  I've wanted to learn how reference books are written so badly."
SoftBank staffer: "Well you're in luck, young intern.  Reference books haven't been written this badly since the days of L. Ron Hubbard."

2. The worst offenders were the VF-4 Lightning III book, which straight-up ignored the official variant list, and the VF-19 Excalibur book's VF-19E being a canon-contradicting mess.

3. The VF-25WR Wyvern in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-25 Messiah is something which previously appeared in the Macross Mechatronics column in Macross Ace magazine.

4. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Valkyrie has a number of designs that are basically renamed or slightly tweaked versions of designs that are official... like the VF-1N being a redesignated VF-1A+, or the VF-1G basically being a less ugly VEFR-1.

5. e.g. the VF-25C based on the VF-19C, the VF-25E being based on a prior Master File description of the VF-1J's main role, the recon model VF-19s with radomes that echo both previous models and the RVF-19EF, the VF-4SL in Master File which is visually identical to the canon one but the S variant having a different design role.

 

Edited by Seto Kaiba
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