This Confuses Gamlin

No Super/Strike Packs. Not even any missiles on the wings

At this point, I'm not sure they have much budget left. They could also be short on time. I'm kind of wondering what the 2nd half would look like if they took a break after episode 13 and started again in the Fall/Winter.

Hell, Reina and Makina don't even have the budget to move: https://twitter.com/MacrossTweet/status/762338125037187075

he is in fact nothing but a fanboy

Those guys need to get out more.

Doesn't "Misa" always win it?

It would be interesting for "Minmay" to actual win it for once.

Mirage and the writers have not earned a Misa outcome, and as it currently stands, I would not respect them if they did that. Misa received plenty of character development alongside Hikaru and Minmay as Macross progressed; Mirage barely gets any screen time and her own character arc is at a standstill. Flipping things around would likely require freezing out Freyja and turning the series into The Mirage Show, on top of spending time on minor business like ending the war. Emotionally, by failing to develop Mirage for the first two-thirds of the series, making her the romance winner in the end feels like a betrayal of the time spent on Freyja's relationship.

Freyja's got a lot more built-in likeability than Minmay or Ranka, since she doesn't have too many rough edges to smooth off, so maybe she's a little shallower of a character than those two. But she's meeting character challenges and broadening as a character. Mirage has... a lot of pouts.

They appear to have been betting on not attracting any more attention than just the thinned-out garrison, but, as is said, "That escalated quickly." Since the ruins were linked, I can only assume that they also knew the risks involved if, as did happen, Heinz sang back at them.

They still would have had better protection if they'd at least sung from inside the shuttle after they'd had their cover blown.

Barriers: The Sigur Valens puts up a regular but rounded barrier shield when the Fold Fault Barrier goes down, which can be explained as an Epsilon addition since the ODB didn't exist until the SDF-1 crew came up with it. Somewhere else in one of these threads it's mentioned that other ships do exhibit ODB-style shielding from time to time. Anyway, there are several occasions where Macross would be a much shorter franchise if the antagonists had access to Sunshine In A Can instead of only being able to use cannons.

The dogfighting argument is inevitably going to run into Rule of Cool and contradictory evidence from different series. I'm not sure that any of us can use examples from Macross 7 given how janky and recycled that animation was, except on rare occasions. I don't think that Delta has totally invalidated the use of multimode combat, but it's certainly moved the emphasis away from it, and I don't think it's an implausible development in the overall scheme of things.

It's interesting and perhaps a bit bothersome that Keith and Messer were able to outfly Hayate, Chuck, and Mirage, since the latter three had been working on tactics to counter either of the former pair. It's not impossible by any means; several Luftwaffe pilots come to mind with regard to fighting larger numbers of opponents. Tough to say whether conversions would have helped those three very much, as it seems that the difference in skill is quite large, and Hayate can only match Keith when he gets an extrasensory powerup, but those three should have been in enough engagements and training that they would at least present some sort of a challenge.

At least they're good enough to handle NUNS VF-171s, but most of the time the franchise has presented those guys as having a skill level slightly above tomato soup. (Might as well mention that Mikhail, who's still a high schooler, thoroughly trash talks NUNS in general in Frontier 4.)

I haven't noticed anything really major yet. It looks nice in 1080, of course. The first few episodes still had really good production quality, so if there are any changes to be made it'll be after Episode 7, when people started to note things like the Windermere cruisers lacking textures, and some later off-model faces.

The EX-Gear shoulder pieces look like they're a lot larger, though.

Three images of the VF-22: Max and Gamlin from M7 and Dynamite 7, then Wright again:

I wonder if the lack of variety of mecha and less use of multiple modes on screen will hurt toy sales. Delta pretty much just has 2 VF with only different paint jobs to tell them apart.

I would also buy figures of the Regult and Glaug variants that showed up in the first episode, if they made them.

1. It's a safe guess that fighter sensors in Macross integrate a lot of individual EM wavelengths together (and other technobabble things like Fold Waves, in later installments). When Guld is testing out the BDI interface in Macross Plus, we can see him looking at one of the flight crew down to something that looks like X-ray or MRI. Speaking of IR in general, the newer fighters/cap ships can reduce their IR emissions via some Fold Space shenanigans, so at least in some cases there's much less of a sore thumb.

3. Leaving a bit of time between launches reduces the risk of collisions, and every bit of energy imparted by the catapult saves the fighter just that much more reaction mass.

I think there is a fallacy that the faster an airplane is the better it is in a dogfight. What would be better in a dogfight, an F/A-18 or a MiG-31?

This is very much a horses-for-courses problem, your two examples are designed around completely different missions (among other things). In a 1v1 close-up, the -18 should have the advantage, but the -31 would ideally have already taken out the -18 at long range.

And I'll stick to the more speed = more options school. It's not everything, but it makes it a lot easier to dictate the engagement versus standing in one spot.

Uh oh, we're about to end up in one of those classic arguments of fighter X vs. fighter Y that nobody can ever escape...

So to drag this off on a related tangent, I'm going to lament how we've hardly ever seen combat that utilizes multiple craft types in a coordinated sense. Frontier as a whole offered an exception to that, best demonstrated in Episode 7, where everyone's special abilities were highlighted for slightly longer than usual. For the rest of Frontier we mostly got the Alto and Ozma (or Brera) show (where they mostly did similar things despite having different weapon pack configurations), while Luca and Mikhail got a tiny bit at the start of the fight, Pixie Team disappeared off somewhere, and the König Monster only ever showed up if something was going to explode.

...and this is even further off the topic of Episode 18, to which I'll offer this thought: I've been giving Arad maybe more grief than Arad deserves, because some of the secrets he didn't reveal before they blew up (so to speak) in his face were actually meant to be secrets, such as who dropped the bomb. But he either knows or must know relevant information about Wright, Gramia, and Windermere that probably would have solved some problems had he mentioned it earlier. Kaname's right to feel a little betrayed by this, practical considerations aside, especially since Arad is turning out to be the type to say "Oh, I knew that before" versus slightly-less-infuriating "I can't tell you about that right now." At least with the latter you don't totally feel like a chump later.

First answer is of course that they might not have been looking until recently, second, maybe the trait really isn't that common. (And it didn't help that the human gene pool was dramatically shrunken.)

And maybe they're still feeling so burned by the Jamming Birds disaster that they'll leave this singing thing to mercenaries, or its just not in the NUNS image to hire singers instead of stolid pilot types.

It's interesting how Battroid usage moved from of the original need to have something capable of ground-fighting a giant humanoid to something done by better pilots in certain circumstances during aerial combat, and most of that probably goes to Max Jenius's particular needs. Though he was fighting against Milia in her Queadluun, which adds a few twists of its own.

(There's also Macross Zero, but I'm going to consider production dates first versus story timeline, since Zero threw in a lot of cool stuff that we didn't get in the original series.)

But the first thing that comes to mind when I consider Isamu versus Guld is that whenever they transformed to Battroid the other guy would always hit them at least once, for which they'd have to use the arm shield. I'd imagine that the average mook that tries to transform in aerial combat will just get shot down... or simply flown past like Bogue did to the two VF-31As in Episode 13.

The problem with Battroid in air-to-air really should be that killing your airspeed to get a shot makes you an easy target for a wingman but that hardly ever comes up.

Flying shouldn't be that much more difficult for a late-model VF, they have crazy TWR. Unless the 31 defaults to dumping all of its engine output to its ECA and PPB in Battroid.

All my Battroid salutes for your choice of closing songs this week.

Keeping the spoiler tags just because, but I have to ask, am I the only person who looks at the Sigur Valens and is a little unnerved that it looks like a freakishly grinning skull?

I wonder how many Chiba Sound Units Mikumo put out in this episode?

All of them?

Messer's plane: Alto's VF-25 dead-sticked in on Gallia IV and he was able to fly it off later...

I wonder how much power the Protoculture had in their stereo systems.

'cause that ship has a whole lotta subwoofers.

so, is there going to be a continuation of this ep? Cause the Walkure seem like they are left hanging on an occupied planet again, I hope they aren't magically back on Elysion next episode.

And how is Hayate getting var all of a sudden? I am waiting for the sub here but am concerned the show is taking a serious left turn where things are happening because it is convenient.

Yay, Valks are back!

ep18b.gif

Well I'm spending this morning waiting for my car at the tire shop so I can't stream/watch anything until later today. Could I have like a 5-word spoiler-free "categorization" of the episode? As in, is it mainly a:

1. Mecha/battle ep.

2. Other plot-advancing/politics ep.

3. Characters/triangle ep.

Four words:

The only thing that is potentially troubling is that it could distract the pilots on their side if not properly directed. Think about it, it would be a fun little weapon if there is a projector mounted on the Valks... which hey, there already are. And distraction at that level could be deadly, there are two dozen micro missiles coming at you, and all of a sudden, a giant fan service Makina flashes in your eyes... if that's not a distraction, even momentarily, then you're not a biological. It's just that moment where you might get killed.

Athletes often mention training themselves to be able to perform while ignoring the numerous distractions going on around them. It would have helped to show Delta and the other Xaos flights practicing with the full holoshow going on so we know that they're used to it, but that would have stolen some of the effect on the anime audience of seeing the concerts for the first time.

In Episode 6, they do split the units so that Delta is the only group that has to fight near their own self-generated spectacle. Probably they would also separate like that if Delta/Walküre had to cooperate with a regular NUNS unit that's not prepared for psychological weirdness.

Though Episodes 1 and 6 are thus far the only instances of large holograms appearing in a battle.

This idea is just for laughs: Alternatively, everyone in NUNS spends their downtime watching idol videos and ecchi. So they're desensitized in case the battle comes down to having to flash gigantic holographic oppai at the enemy.

Makina is magical... in her own way.

Here it is again with the levels turned up:

So, what does Freyja officially say when Hayate finds her in the shipping container?

I've been suspicious about that "Going to the bathroom was hard..." line.

"You're already 14! I won't allow you to waste the rest of your life! You'll marry the apple farmer's second son!" said the Mayor.

I told him, "No" but he said "This is not negotiable!"

So I mustered up enough courage to sneak aboard a ship.

Now my butt hurts and going to the bathroom, well...

Oh! Where are my manners?! I'm Freyja Wion.

I am so truly... truly... starving!

The other infamous line, Japanese doughnuts/onigiri, totally dodged localization and became "Thanks for sharing your lunch."

~~~

On another topic, I finally noticed that in addition to the usual 0.89 and broadcast versions of the first episode, they did their own hybrid edit with all of the 0.89 scenes and the full broadcast ending. Of course that was probably in the documentation and I just never paid attention.

Flying Dog released shortened versions of the two opening songs to YouTube, but they're region-blocked for the US (this can be circumvented a few ways).