d3v

Delta focusing on an idol group is just Macross being Macross by focusing on the popular J-pop trends of the day. Just like how bands and visual kei was on the rise in the 90s (when we got 7), idol groups are the big thing nowadays, with groups like Morning Musume, AKB47, Momoiro Clover Z, etc. being at the zenith of their popularity. Instead of the solo career routes of Minmay, Sheryl, and Ranka (and Mari Iijima, May'n and Megumi Nakajima) most aspiring singers in Japan now go through the whole idol group route (I'm pretty sure Walkure's VAs will be packaged as an idol group IRL as well).

YF-30 = tech demonstrator

VF-31 = application of the tech demoed by the 30.

On an unrelated note, I've always wanted a Macross shiw based on police forces using Valks. A sort of Macross version of Patlabor if you will.

come on guys... let's go karaoke! i wanna get my "...todoke... todoke..." on... ichido dake no koi nara is total earworm

Did someone say Karaoke?

ORE NO UTA WO KIKE!

yozora wo kakeru RABU HA-TO

moeru omoi wo nosete

kanashimi to nikushimi wo uchiotoshite yuke

Some of the stuff from the Knights (and Roid) sounds almost like space Nazi talk. Not surprising since they've basically been portrayed as Macross's Zeon.

Umm...

Protodevlin.jpg

I want to see KumoKumo try to go against Basara (BasaBasa? NekkiNekki?) in a sing off to see who can get Gepelnitch to sing along with them.

Dammit, now I have Gepelnitch singing "Kiss kiss, feel love" in my head.

I'm assuming it is a 2 cour anime like Frontier which would give it anywhere from 24 to 26 episodes. SDF Macross was originally a 2 cour but was extended by 10 episodes which is a bit unusual (likely only due to budget reasons that it didn't get more, not that it needed more really). Macross 7 is a notable difference in that it was a 4 cour anime which meant they planned for it to be well liked enough to manage up to 50 episodes. The show's black sheep status aside, that was clearly a correct prediction.

Typically, and mind you I am no expert on this at all, Anime that have a reasonable chance for success get a 2 cour broadcast and if they do really well they'll maybe get a sequel series (which to Americans would be analogous to a second season, Japan doesn't typically use the same methodology there). This is true of 1 cour shows too though. A recent example might be Aldnoah Zero which was clearly written to be 26 episodes but they split it up into 1 cour arcs that aired independently but under the same title. That is not too typical, but it worked for the story. I see a lot of stand alone anime shows though that are only 1 cour, or roughly 12 to 13 episodes. That tells me those productions were considered good enough to make but not expected to be popular enough for larger broadcasts.

Macross is huge enough to get at least 24 episodes in a given series by now. However I don't know if it is enough for them to want to risk budgeting a full 4 cour 50ish episode show again. Realistically, 24 - 26 is a good episode count for a self-contained story. 50 episode shows tend to resort to filler episodes and story padding just to make up the episode count (and Macross 7 is not innocent of that).

Technically, SDFM was planned to be 4 cour, but was then cut down to 2 cour, before fan demand and Tatsunoko stepped in for those extra episodes. 4 cour or longer was the norm back in the day, even up to the mind 90s which is how M7 got its long run, but that's no longer the case these days and most shows now go for only 1 full cour. The fact along that Gundam shows get broken up into 2 parts tells alot.

I don't think they've even tried to make the sympathetic. They're still in the "cool, pretty, bad-boy" phase.

Wasn't that a Quarter class?

If it is one, then it doesn't have legs.

Great screencaps. Now I'm curious how the speaker pod transforms (if it transforms at all). Maybe it is a space only add-on that doesn't need to be transformed. Or it folds down around a strut that also holds the beam gun-pod in place. Maybe the VF-31 will look much more like the Armored Messiah when the projector pod is folded up.

You clearly see the speaker pods transforming in that same episode.

• The top-most pod looks like the folded radome from Chuck's VF-31E. Does this imply I wonder that the radome can be installed on any VF-31 and it is not specific to Chuck's VF-31E?

I wonder about this myself. Actually, I wonder about the actual purpose of giving each member of Delta a different 31 variant. Arad somewhat makes sense since commander variants are a standard thing in Macross, however you'd think the rest of the team would get the same variant (except maybe Chuck).

At the very least, they should have left Hayate ad Freyja behind, or had a subplot where they were supposed to stay behind but ended up coming anyway. I think it's implied that the others, especially Mikumo, have some sort of undercover training.

An addendum I guess, is there any dimensions on the size of the carrier arm for the Aether, compared to the Quarter? WIth these carriers, it is always a bit deceptive to see what the actual sizes are;

Because the sizes are strangely deceptive, if you look at the Aether, one could say that it is about the same size as the Quarter carrier. But hard to tell just by looking.

Well the Elysion itself is supposed to be larger than the Quarter class, so that could point to the Aether being larger than the quarter carrier.

Since she's now actually a grandmother, I wonder if Milia still doesn't like being called "oba-san".

The absurd List.

- Pretty sure you don't hack a computer with pacman and singing.

So it looks like Winderemere apples + protoculture spring water = Var syndrome.

GG still getting Hayate's rank wrong. Juni should be Warrant Officer, no Sergeant.

Jellyfish crackers = unresolved sexual tension and secondary love triangle.

live jellyfish = yuri goodness.

Thanks for the photo! So it seems confirmed that SK/Macross decided to make TWO new stars this time around? Making just one got too old , it happened since like 1982?

#TeamJUNNA

Well technically, Frontier was also a big boost for May'n's career.

If anyone's a traitor, it's Mikumo. (she keeps not dying from the attacks, despite taking circuses to the face...)

She's actually genetically derived from the Evil series/Protodeviln so that the only thing that can harm her is Anima Spiritia.

"Ah, the beauty of plot armor."

I'm betting the Elysion will prove to show that much better than the Quarter did. I don't really see the "folding". I see the core has three modules. The center where the bridge sits and two outer modules that appear to be where the arms are attached. The three modules rotate differently to create the battle ship.

I say "fold" because that seems to be the most descriptive way to describe the motion with the crotch rotating up to meet the center torso.

EDIT: Colored in the parts of the Elysion so it would be easier to see how it seems to transform.

Yeah, somehow I'm thinking we're getting the translation of the Aerial Knights ranking wrong. They should be following a knighthood, so-to-speak. The way Bogue calls out to Keith, I'm getting the feeling he's calling him "Sir Keith" (something-Keith-sama, which would be something-Lord/Master/elder Keith, but you get the idea).

They're literally addressing him as the White Knight - "Shiro Kishi-sama". The problem is that it translates weirdly into "sir white knight" if you try to translate the "-sama" honorific. Of course, you could try "Lord White Knight" but "lord" itself is a different word.

Back to the subject of loadouts, at 15:43, we can see Bogue's beam gun get shot out of his hand by a shot from Hayate. Looking at it closely, it seems that Hayate shot him with his 31's own beam gunpod. This is supported by the fact that the shot has the same sound as the beam gunshot from Mirage later in the same episode.

Yeah it quite surprised me when Herman was referred to by the German rank Hauptmann (Captain) in the subtitles.

Perhaps they should have referred to him as Kapitan (and Redshirt-kun as Leytenant) instead since they already used the Russian "da" in the show.

I used to think that Mikumo just kept saying those things to Freyja so she'd be on edge and end up tripping some more because she secretly has a thing for Dojikko girls and thinks that it would be a wonderful addition to the group.

EDIT:

I think Hayate's already moving past the "needs to hear Freyja sing to fly" phase.

If you look closely, you can see that there's more effort here to make the cruiser mode seem like a coherent ship. For one, the top of the arm carriers form a flat deck with the sides of the leg.

It is still far better than the "oops, I fell" of the onscreen Quarter.

I figure that that was done so that the Quarter could quickly and smoothly transition between cruiser and attack modes on the fly.

Maybe to show their dialect or military lingo is different? gg interpreted it like German rankings.

True, but gg does get the ranks wrong. They're still labeling Hayate as a Sergeant (Gunso) when he should be a Warrant Officer (Juni).

What's up with the rank designations that the Aerial Knights are using? When Hermann was talking to the redshirt, he referred to him as as "Shoki" instead of Shoi and, then Redshirt-kun refers to Hermann as "Taiki" instead of Taii.