tout-puissant

Heh, I'm not sure that a lot of people who aren't into the rap scene would know this. I certainly don't. That said, I'm selfishly enjoying the fact that my daughter and I can easily do the thing, while my wife is struggling to cross her fingers like the girls. Makes watching the show a little more fun. Mark <--- heading for the doghouse, I know

Regarding Alto, his school had a VF-1 perched as a gate guard, so who knows - maybe he simmed in various publicly-available craft, including civilian versions of older fighters (which for all we know could go all the way up to the VF-19P). The Ex-Gear would take care of the rest - and the notion that he was skilled in the Gear in the first place suggests that the Ex-Gear was meant to instill commonality in variable fighter control. Yes, still a stretch, but not an inconceivable one by anime standards. And now we have Hayate, who can jump into a VF-171 and dance around the notion (pun intended) that just anyone can fly a military craft. OTOH, by 2067 the variants of the VF-17 family will have been around for over 30 years, more than almost any of our characters will have been alive in Delta OR Frontier. It may be that the VF-171 is such a baseline fighter that anyone can go to the arcade, or download a game to your phone with a realistic depiction of how the systems work. In Hayate's case, his workroid training and natural skill would fill in the rest, at least for the -171 as a battroid. The minute he switched the thing over to fighter (and somehow kept the arm from folding in and crushing Freyja) he was almost certainly at his limit. Mark

The Macross Quarter transformation was really just half-squatting and sticking the arms and legs out. Bascially the same thing as Battle 7 / Frontier / Galaxy but with less parts actually touching each other. If the Elysium ends up being a scaled-up Quarter in design, I'd expect it to have the same transformation as well - the limbs in the screenshots do not look like they come together in any meaningful way. But who knows? For all we know, Elysium could be an OLDER design and the Quarter is in fact a scaled DOWN version of it! No one's really blinked at its size or design, and Quarter made Alto jump because it was small and yet packed such a punch. Not that it makes much of a difference, all Macross ships have kicked ass in each of their respective series... Mark

Re; Elysium, my bet is that it's a slightly enlarged variant of the Quarter. Quarter stands about 300m tall, which as has been noted is around the height of a 90-story building. I can buy that from the screenshots provided and can dismiss the rest as cosmetic differences. If anything, consider it the same sort of differences between the Nimitz-class aircraft carriers and the forthcoming Gerald R. Ford class. The latter is a teeny big bigger and the tower is completely different in configuration and placement, but otherwise they share the same basic shape. And regarding that city dome in the lake, note that while it's definitely not the scale as Island One, it seems to be much smaller than City 7 as well. It's got skyscrapers poking through the dome and all, but compared to the Manhattan-esque metropolis skyline that comprised most of City 7, and what was basically the entire City of San Francisco in Island 1, this one seems to be a much smaller city with some Zentradi-scale trees around it. Maybe half the size of City 7? Round about what the ol' Megaroad class would be hauling inside? Something that Elysium could dock with? We don't even know how long Barette City here has been in existence. Could be a relatively new construction, or it could be decades old - it's impossible to really tell given how fast construction happens in the Macross universe. The locals, assuming they invited / allowed the colony to settle there, have certainly wasted no time integrating the culture. That Chaos is using Ragna as a base of operations for its state of the art planes and tech is indicative that this is no backwater planet. Tech-wise, this is a delicious world-building episode and I'm loving it. Mark

The show holds up pretty well with repeated viewings. Watched it a third time with my six year-old and once the work mecha started dancing, she got hooked (despite not being able to read the fansubs). My wife is a singer (and has even covered some J-pop over the years - look up "Irulanesque" on YouTube) and as with Frontier, she came to like it too. And of course, it had GIANT ROBOT SPLOSIONS, so I was happy. I'm looking forward to how the story will unfold. We were told it the setup involved people singing to counteract a plague that's been inducing violent outbreaks on the outer rim of the Galaxy. That's Macross-esque as it is, but the premiere throws a faction of humanity who seem to be using this "Var Syndrome" to their advantage, and have a beef against a quartet of cute singing girls and their hotshot pilot partners. It seems a better evolution at the outset than Frontier was from 7 (in that the plot doesn't have to re-discover how music is used against an antagonist), and takes using music as a weapon (and a plot device) further down a logical path for this universe. Looking forward to the continuation. And not that it makes much of a difference, but oddly enough Frontier and 7 were set towards the galactic core and involved ancient alien threats, while Plus and now Delta are more rimward and involve menaces from within the futuristic societies of the Macross universe. Coincidence? Mark