tout-puissant

But to set a bunch of context, odds are the SDF-1 crew were thinking short-term while choosing a place to land, and not about rebuilding the planet. After the battle, the ship was probably busted to heck and back and HAD to land, or else lose the ship entirely - it was probably venting too much atmosphere to make staying in orbit (where presumably the remaining rebel Zentradi would help) an option. So, with literally only minutes or at most a few hours to figure things out, they detected Misa's radio signal and made a call that if they had to land, may as well be where anyone could potentially help (or has been mentioned, at least where there was a fair chance of finding stuff with which to help themselves if Britai and his gang decided to suddenly end their alliance but NOT nuke the ashes after all). I think it was foregone that the Macross would never fly again (at that time), so I can see them choosing Alaska in haste instead of thinking where best to put down ahead of reconstructing the home world.

Mark

Macross TV series have always been about moving the franchise forward - new worlds, new stories, new possibilities. If we want a side story, follow-up, or prequel, the OVA is the usual go-to format as those stories tend to be more fan-oriented and therefore more niche market. If we're ever to see Macross the First or an adaptation of an existing work, it'll most likely be as an OVA or movie (or otherwise be a fan-service name drop as Minmei has been in Frontier and Delta). 

If this is a TV series, my money is that it'll be a direct sequel to Delta (and thus let the franchise extend its investment in the current idol group), or a new story set shortly after Delta but in the same time frame and general universe rules, where Var / Windermere / Chaos / Walkure presence may e a major player or a name-drop. The short time frame between Delta and this strongly suggests that it won't be a brand new show and instead leverage what we just finished, or else Kawamori simply has a hell of an idea and didn't want to wait another five years before showing it.

Regardless, a new TV anime will be less about addressing complaints of the old franchise fans and more about satisfying the current younger generation, as that's where the money has always been in every iteration of this franchise. As long as idol units are hotter than solo acts and people like giant transforming planes, Macross won't be in for a major paradigm shift, so we'll IMO we'll get more of the same... Of course we can hope for better writing and perhaps even better animation quality, but even if it stays on the level of Frontier and Delta, it'll likely be plenty good for today's mass-market anime consumer.

Mark

PS - Disclaimer: I'm an anime fan born in the late 70s, who places Frontier above Delta, but who has loved every version of Macross and has spent time in the Macross Delta room at Joysound to show for it.

Cue Megaroad speculation in 5... 4... 3...

Wha, I'm already too late? Dangit!

Mark

A little too late, I would've sent you my Akihabara "Genshiken Style" Route.

You're in luck, I'm heading to Akiba on Sunday. What is this route you speak of?

Mark

Joysound, a Japanese karaoke chain, is doing a Macross Delta theme room starting today!

http://shop.joysound.com/campaign/macrossdelta/

I'm visiting Japan right now and enquired with them - they're booked solid today. Anyone in town wanna join my wife and child in Shinjuku tomorrow though, we've reserved it for an hour and will be checking it out!

Mark

Sorry for bringing this up here - but I'm in Tokyo right now. Any Macross specific stuff happening, Delta or otherwise? Anyone know if that last character goods lottery is still going? I'll only be spending one day shopping in Akiba this time, and it's likely to be my last time for a while, so I want to be efficient in hunting for Macross Merch. Any pointers would be welcome!

Mark

Well, I guess this may mean that Lady M is *not* Mylene after all...

Mark

I did enjoy this week's episode - always like a good origin story. Nice new song, filling in some details on Walkure's early days, failures and even successes before Mikumo showed up. This felt like a decent non-mecha Macross episode. It's a shame that most of the second half of this show are just like it.

Yes, Delta has been having severe arc and pacing problems in this second half, after an overall solid first half. I feel like much of the second half are almost standalone side stories for our heroes while those other guys on Windermere are advancing with the main plot - kinda like watching a bunch of "The Galaxy Is Calling Me" and those Macross 7 OVA episodes after finishing Macross 7.

No one sets out to make bad television, which leaves me to wonder what happened in the writers room when they broke the arc of the series. They may have realized after production started that they just didn't have enough story to fill 2-cours of show, and after moving plot elements forward they could only backfill the remaining time with flashbacks and side stories to pan out the show till the end. In the meantime, the songs and idol unit that the show is supporting have been arguably more successful than the show, which is the bottom line for the studio after all.

This being Macross AND a still-very-popular anime in this day and age, we'll almost certainly have a compilation movie or two within a couple years. This gives SK and his crew a chance to produce a version of Delta with the right balance of story, character and MAYBE even mecha action to satisfy more of us hardcore, non-Japanese fans.

Mark

We've still got five episodes to go. Frontier this ain't, but in the latter half of Frontier there were also a couple episodes which didn't seem to be going anywhere. Obviously there's an endgame here, and I'm sure it'll make up for SOME of the disappointment everyone's expressing here for the middling middle episodes, but still... While it may still be above average IMO for a mecha-based anime series, Frontier this ain't.

Mark

Yep. It's short and cute, and arguably gives Mirage more character moments than in the past two months on the actual show.

Plus, it tries to establish the outfits Walkure wears as NOT MAGIC. Close maybe, but NOT MAGIC!

Mark

The one thing I kept asking myself this episode was why do people still need to wear glasses with all the major advances in technology that has been developed over the many years? And, aren't Windmearians supposed to be super human? So, what's with Roids glasses?

Well, we have the technology for laser eye surgery RIGHT NOW, and it's not like people are lining up to get it done. Costs aside, it doesn't always work, and in fact can even make things worse for some people. Others simply are not physically capable to be fixed by the procedure in the first place.

Heck, in the (original) Star Trek movies, a minor plot point was about Kirk's developing near-sightedness, and how he was allergic to whatever miracle drug would normally be used, hence his own need for reading glasses. Suffice it to say that no matter the ailment, there's always a percentage of the population for which it won't work. And why in this case, glasses are needed for Macross-related reasons.

Mark

The GG team mentioned last week they'd be delayed this week again. Patience, grasshoppers! In this world of dwindling fansubbers, we should be counted lucky that one group is doing it at all.

Mark

There may be some limited application of anti-grave but for gravity (and inertial) negation purposes, allowing the girls to use the jets for propulsion a whole lot easier. Furthermore, the opaque underwear is supplemented by a transparent skin-tight suit, and ARGUABLY a helmet in some cases as Reina was wearing one when she jumped out of Chuck's plane in episode 1, where it promptly disappeared as her outfit transformed. I'd guess that the fold projector stuff effectively works as a hard light hologram too, so people can have their outfits (and hair!) change, be blown around, and perhaps even be discarded as needed.

And no, it's NOT magic. We're just supposed to accept it.

Mark

I'd say it looks most like diamond force's flight suit with the big upper chest and shoulder piece replaced with the mid back diamond shaped thing. So an EX gear comparable update of the special forces gear?

Ah! Thanks for that.

I'm calling it now - Haya-Haya's dad is Skeletor!

Mark

Wow, now you can crowdfund freedom. Lotsa politicians should take a hint.

This mid-series lull *feels* like it should be told in fewer episodes, but IMO it's a case of the heroes sitting out traditional Macross action while other parties are seen fighting (and losing). However, this episode features a galactic-scale attack (and fundraiser!) that probably SHOULD have had more time, or at least been given more setup besides an offhand remark by Mikumo last week and then suddenly jumping into a concert featuring all manner of stock footage besides a couple new songs (not complaining about that, BTW). Methinks marathoning Delta would give a more positive takeaway, but we shouldn't HAVE to do that. At least we can conclude that while we aren't looking, it's the past couple episodes that Walkure has been madly writing all the songs we'll here from here through the remaining episodes.

And the beautiful cameo VF-22 shows up again, in full NUNS livery. Anyone catch the flight suit that Immelman Sr. was using? It wasn't what a typical NUNS CF pilot wears, and sure didn't look like 2046-era fashion:

http://www.oocities.org/drakkenwulf_2000/Images/maximilian.gif

Mark

We really only saw the restaurant and the mall. For all we know, the mall / commercial areas of the city could have been properly maintained as such all this time and thus would have little trouble adapting to life in space... Given how much of Japanese life is centered around commercial shopping, it wouldn't surprise me at all that the producers wrote the Island ship with the intent of keeping it like a big destination outlet mall or something, not unlike the equivalent spaces in Japan.

Realistically, I'd guess that between their new sponsors bringing in the life-critical supplies (including stuff to get restaurants running - remember Nyan Nyan has a VERY long history of getting going again after emergency space folds!), and some form of martial law keeping prices on more luxury type items like gifts for Frejya spiraling out of control, they'd have some sense of normalcy once everyone was billeted to the residential areas of the ship. From a morale standpoint, this would be one of the primary things to re-establish.

Obviously they're skipping over a lot of the little things like patching air holes and establishing government (sic), but I think we're not really meant to worry about them. Humanity in Macross is probably a primarily spacefaring race, both culturally and technically. Pretty much everyone should be used to the realities of packing up and moving around the galaxy in giant ships designed to mimic everyday planetary life, even if they haven't literally done so themselves.

Mark

Actually, this is more a test. But if y'all can see this, I'd appreciate if you let me know.

https://www.facebook.com/173806499326808/videos/1256534254387355/?pnref=story

My wife "Irulanne" covers J-pop and other music regularly, and this week her cover is " Ichido Dake No Koi Nara", i.e. the first OP of Delta. Unfortunately YouTube flags her covers regularly (and I've yet to figure out a way to defeat this), so the video is on Facebook - but it's set to public, so I'm hoping you guys can see it. Enjoy!

We're hoping that the next release will have the karaoke of "Giraffe Blues" as promised, as that's a target too. Macross is part of our family viewing, and we love being able to enjoy it creatively in this way too.

Mark

Agreed considering that Macross Elysion is a new class of ship that the design probably been around at least 10yrs as the Macross Quarter must had been based on the mini-me version of it. Wanted to ask, which came first, the Macross Quarter design or the Macross Elysion design as it seems to have the same transformation process compared to the SDF or New Macross class ships.

Looking closely again at the ship that landed on Ragna in the episode 5 flashback, while I still think it's a different ship than the one we see in the present day, I'm now wondering if the earlier ship (which I still believe is a re-use of the Island One model from Frontier with a different set of buildings manually drawn in) doesn't have a ship docked to its front at all. Looking at that picture and taking its perspective into account, there may be an empty docking port up front, and what some people think is the ship's underside is actually one of the flanking structures aft of the actual port...

Regarding Elysion, my impression is that it had been sitting on Ragna for some time and hadn't just recently arrived. There's absolutely no evidence shown as to how long it's been there, other than the carriers have slightly worn paint on the flight deck as seen in episode 2 (no big deal, modern-day ships are constantly repainting). It could be only a couple years old, or it could be a couple decades old and/or represent an interm step in the reduction of Macross type ship sizes between the Battle and Quarter class ships. The fact that it's used by a civilian contractor and is not being tested out suggests that it's an older or proven design that the feds aren't using or have permitted to be built, perhaps like the VF-19P we saw on Zola.

But perhaps this should be discussed further on the Delta technology thread.

Mark

Perhaps "force projection" isn't the best terminology, but the big colonization fleets are what Earth has getting the flag out that Humanity is rockin' the galaxy, crisscrossing known and unknown space looking to propagate the species (and succeeding -with the "then what happens?" question being addressed in Delta to a large extent).

But the Macross verse should be a relatively peaceful, if flawed, society on the whole. And we know that NUNS was reorganized so that they wouldn't NEED a huge fleet of doomsday ships patrolling known space for the next upstart state to cause a ruckus.

So wither the big ships? In theory, lots of those initial colony fleets should have found a place to settle by now. We've always thought that the UNS/NUNS fleets that accompanied them would form the local garrison, but if so, where are up to two dozen Battle-class ships? Sitting around like Elysion was on Ragna, pulling an SDF-1 impression? Perhaps Kawamori and co were careful not to show an NMBC in those flashback sequences to keep people from concluding that there WOULD be a big ship somewhere local?

Mark

Well, with the arguable exception of the Battle 13 carrier, we have yet to really see a Macross-type ship operating independently of some large civilian / colonial organization. Pretty much since Macross Plus, whenever we've seen UNS/NUNS solo fleet action it's been with the smaller ships:

- Isamu's deep space assignment

- The research fleet that went to Varauta

- The VF-X teams from those games

The entire Earth planetary fleet in 2040 had no hint of anything bigger than an Uraga in orbit either, though I'd be reasonably sure there was SOMETHING Macrossesque up there - just not visible to distract we nerds from the YF-19/21 mecha porn.

To a certain extent this is reasonable - you don't have the big bad guns merely floating around. In the Macross verse, your principal element of force projection would be your colonial fleets, so you'd give them the Macross-type ships to meet the bad guys in unexplored space. Closer to home in controlled space, which arguably includes the Brisinglr cluster, you don't need it to simply keep the peace (unless you're a contractor like Chaos, who could need a cool symbol to rally around). In today's military, the USN has carrier groups, but aside from that all the other smaller task forces are groups of destroyers and cruisers who cruise around in very small deployments or even solo (and in the case of submarines, exclusively so).

So I'd imagine that almost all the Macross-type ships in the Delta era are busy fulfilling their primary mission of protecting colonial fleets. I've no doubt there would be bigger guns free-floating, but they would be pretty rare and perhaps hard to mobilize - physically or politically. Thing is of course, if it were THAT simple to bring in an NMBC (or whatever else they have that could level large parts of a given planet's topology), they'd simply do it and make for a less exciting show.

But if you think about it, the governments today IRL have access to doomsday weapons and don't use them either to invade countries or to enforce policy. Perhaps by having an NMBC come in and destroy the capital city of whoever was disagreeing with them, NUNS would look REALLY bad to everyone else...

Mark

I'm gonna be in Japan again from October 14-24. I'm there for my wife to watch the next Sailor Moon musical, but I reaaaaaaallly hope that something Macross will be int he offing while I'm there. I don't suppose there's a general calendar of Walkure stuff (releases, appearances, etc.) that's available somewhere? I understand that the show will most likely be over by that point but perhaps something will still be coming out to capitalize on it...

Mark

I think that could be how Chaos got their hands on her in the first place - taking a ship no one else wanted to field. After all, SMS seemed to have Quarter only because they'd been contracted to test that ship out, no?

NUNS seems far and away to NOT be ship-sized robot based otherwise we'd have tons of Quarters and Elysions and Battles and SDF-04 Globals around, but even in 2067 they seem to be pretty rare. For whatever reason they seem to stick to fleets of non-transforming carriers and combatants, but not the larger, more expensive Macross type of ship. Granted their nominal expense would preclude EVERYONE having one, but you'd think that their general utility in combat would mean you'd get more than one per fleet, or one per globular cluster as the case seems to be here.

Mark

EDIT: Confirmed, it's the Island-1 model... they didn't even remove the observation platform over the SMS Macross Quarter's dock from the top-down views.

<Looks really, REALLY closely>

By Jove, you're right. I think at least the topside of the RIS a very heavily modified version of the Island One model. Some things are identical, like the SMS Quarter's berth and the doodads sticking out of the port and starboard sides, but if you examine the actual dome closely, the pattern of the train lines snaking across the dome is the same as Island One too. But here's the kicker - the 2D map used as the cityscape "floor" is the same, only with minor modifications! You can see the same hills, green spaces, and the huge lake at the rear end, as on Island One. Compare the pic of the RIS that I uploaded with the overhead view here:

http://www.macross2.net/m3/macrossf/macross25/macross25-schematictop.jpg

Now to be fair, there HAVE been a number of significant modifications. The entire perimeter of the RIS has the sawtooth shapes I mentioned before that aren't on Island One at all, the forward fins are comparatively smaller and shaped differently, the big boxy thing is off the aft end, and of course it's filled with dull grey buildings now. I've capped a ventral view now, so you can see there are significant differences in the texture maps used.

So, while not a shameless re-use of the previous model, it's still a significantly disguised / modified version. Very Star Trek, to use the comparison - they used one model for a Klingon Bird of Prey to represent at least four sizes of ship over the years.

Still, I agree the INTENT is that the RIS is a smaller craft that any dome-style ship we've seen before. It's just too small when the Aether or Elysion are right next to it to be more than a couple klicks in length.

Mark

I'm not sure the ship in episode 1 is an Island One-type vessel, whatever that is docked to the front doesn't really look like an NMBC. Hard to tell from the angle though. The ship in Episode 5's pre-opening sequence is definitely the same one we're always seeing on Ragna though (and now in space too) - it has the buildings sticking out of the dome.

It sure does have buildings sticking out, but far more than we see on the RIS and far more densely packed. My belief is that the Episode 5 ship is the Frontier model with the buildings drawn in (as well as the lid being removed of course) for the one static shot we see. Besides, City 7 also shows buildings sticking through the dome, in a similar density to the Episode 5 ship. The RIS buildings really feature just two that pop through the dome, two identical, cylindrical towers that were consistently seen in both the CG and hand-drawn versions.

Crappy screenshots for analysis:

The RIS (not sure it should be called Barrette City, since I believe that would count the whole municipality AND the colony ship) is definitely a new CG model now, though previously it had been hand-drawn. The re-use of the Island One model in episodes 1 and 5 of Delta can't be conclusively implied to be the same ship IMO.

And the Macross 7 fleet had only one dome-style ship. The other colony ships in the fleet were more specialized and smaller, and only two had a dome-esque appearance, unless you also count the cemetery ship from Macross 7 Trash:

http://www.macross2.net/m3/macross7/riviera-resortship.htm

http://www.macross2.net/m3/macross7/sunnyflower.htm

The Macross 5 fleet had at least three identical-looking dome ship blocks, and New Macross class carriers to go with them. The Macross 1 fleet had one big, lidless dome ship and several smaller dome ships of similar design (attached to NMBCs as well, or so it seems); and if the RIS was part of that fleet or Macross 2, then they had smaller-still designs along for the ride.

http://www.macross2.net/m3/macross7/newmacross/newmacross1.jpg

Mark