Shaka_Z

simple... the skintight bodysuit she wears as part of the holographic system is covering all the interesting bits. I am actually thinking that holography in Macross has advanced to ST:Voyager levels, where the holographic systems are small enough to wear, and also are able to project a solid image - to an extent - that responds as the real article would. this would also explain why sheryl has to occasionally change outfits - she kills the batteries really fast with those complex outfit designs.

afterthought or not, it works. and the fact that her hair changes color to something closer to Mao's when she is near death was an interesting bit of proof. it seems that she was also wearing some kind of haircessory like Mao used to (and ranka too... it wouldnt surprise me at all at this point if sheryl and ranka were cousins. Alto may be in for BIG trouble lol)

ummm... not quite so simple. it isnt so much an issue of going faster in terms of top speed, but accelerating more rapidly to a given speed. the proper determinant of a craft's top speed is the exhaust velocity of its' engines - best expressed by the term known as specific impulse or Isp. Isp is best used to determine how much reaction mass is necessary to accelerate a vehicle to a given velocity (with higher Isp values being better).

the easiest way IIRC is to get a player from a european market that is already region free. last time I was in Denmark, most all of the DVD players for sale were clearly marked on the box specifications as being both multi-region and multi-standard capable. no hacks required - and this included the sony units.

hmmm... I don't get all the Zero bashing. I personally loved that OAV series, although episode 4 was too slow for the most part. episode 5 strangely can still pull tears from me even after many viewings, and given the revelations of M:F I can now understand much of the premise behind the power of song in zero within the proper context. the main reason why I put zero in 3rd place in another thread here was because it was too short IMHO for the kind of story it was - much like frontier - and should have gone to a full 13 eps.

this all goes to my feeling that Frontier should have been longer to allow for better fleshing out of certain aspects of the storyline... If it was it would have been far more epic, and even more worthy of being the spiritual successor to SDFM. yes I like Epic tales.

I wouldnt say that it's magic... nor would I agree with Duke and go so far as to say its' crappy science. it should be noted that science still has more unanswered questions about the universe than answered... our best models of how the universe works might be turned on edge or discarded altogether under the right circumstances (though that is unlikely as science prefers to modify extant theory to accomodate for new data whenever possible instead). for all we know, there might be creatures like the vajra out there somewhere. what I am getting at is this: nearly all of our scientific understanding is limited by our exclusively terrestrial frame of reference. everything we observe and theorize on is thus tainted by (and restricted to) those limitations.

remember too that in most cases, Sheryl's skimpier 'performance' costumes are really holographic projections... so while she is in fact holding her 'assets', what the viewer is seeing are not the aforementioned assets. lol. let me be clear - I have no doubt that sheryl has the bod to wear that stuff, but you realize how much time it would take to actually do all those different costumes? some of them look pretty complicated.

to sum it all up, I think a paraphrasing of Delenn of Babylon 5 is in order for the humans and zentraedi of the macross universe: they have finally grown out from beneath the shadow of their parents - it is now time for them to make their own magic.

I have indeed seen DYRL - just rewatched it last night matter of fact. forgive me for saying that I greatly prefer SDFM the series, as I feel that DYRL suffers from the same issues that movie adaptations of Tom Clancy novels do - it tries to distill something that really shouldnt be distilled, and loses a great deal of nuance in the process... it just doesnt have that epic feel the original series gives me. lol mark my words I will eventually get to it - I know it's those first few eps that are the really big hurdle. it's mainly the whole thing with the speaker missiles that makes me want to retch.

my own preference: 1 - SDFM 2 - M+/MF (tie) 3 - Zero I havent been able to get past the first 2 episodes of M7, DYRL being a movie within the universe doesnt really count for me. Frontier could have easily taken 2nd for itself if it had been just a little longer (preferably 12-13 eps longer) and more detailed with the storyline - too many characters and plotlines got short-changed IMHO. that said it was still a helluva ride - just not as refined as it could have been.

I would have to say that on the whole, humanity has most certainly NOT surpassed the PC. yes, in a few small niche technological areas we have managed to one-up them, but in the vast overall scheme of things we are still like little children compared to their achievments - the birdman of MacZero for instance was able to regenerate its' form from a decrepit wreck to a ship-killing monster in the space of just a few minutes by absorbing matter directly from the atmosphere for cryin out loud! the GA of frontier has managed to come close to PC achievements in terms of control interfaces however if Grace's manner of interfacing with the vajra superqueen in ep25 is any indication. there is also the issue of the average level of technology available to the masses in PC society - while we really have no idea of what the typical PC citizen had access to, it was almost certainly far more advanced than the tech available to the average human in 2059, which is pretty much just more refined versions of what is available right now IRL... the really good stuff is not for public use or even for the public to know about.

hmmm... I like this theory... combined with my own, it makes perfect sense

heh... what's your personal best for a Clancy novel... say 'Red Storm Rising'? iirc I got through it cover to cover in about 3 days...

as to the bit about sheryl being intimidating, and alto's deer in headlights look when she get aggressive: I think she has a naughty habit of launching surprise lip-lock attacks on him when he least expects it. couple that with his apparently conservative japanese upbringing - where he would be most comfortable being the aggressor - and you can understand his reaction... sheryl has developed the 'shock and awe' technique to dizzying heights. note that *if* the kiss in his mother's room happened, it serves to illustrate his comfort with being the aggressor/initiator of that kind of thing. when she turns up the heat, she probably causes a lot of his brains higher functions to short out, leaving what's left to wonder why her kissing him is making his toes curl. she then misinterprets his inaction as lack of interest and backs off before his brain can reboot. yes thats right... alto's brain runs on windows

well... I must stand and admit it (not that I havent before): I am a Sheryl Shipper that said, I feel compelled to make the observation that the scene between sheryl and ranka at the end of 25 might not have necessarily been inconclusive, depending on what you read between the lines. basically I think that ranka's statement that she wouldnt lose to sheryl in song or love doesnt necessarily include alto in the love part - there is a certain parallel with ranka/alto compared to mao/shin. She still loves alto, but I think she may have started to put him in a similar spot in her heart as brera. I think ranka has determined that it has stopped being about who either of them loves, but about the strength and sincerity of the feeling. this came about once she realized that sheryl truly loves alto (in a romantic sense) when she said that 'the idiot has gone flying' - a part of alto that ranka still couldnt connect* with fully even after having alto explain it to her before she left frontier, while sheryl has connected with it since almost the beginning. if there had been an ex-gear right there, I am quite sure that sheryl would have got right in and flown** with him - she might love it when he carries her aloft, but that isnt a relationship of equals is it? I dont see sheryl as ever being truly satisfied with being cargo, and I seriously doubt ranka would have been inclined to fly herself. alto OTOH made it clear in ep 24 when he said that 'one should never fly alone'... look at this as being literal truth for him - he may love flying, but without someone to share it with (who loves it as well) that love is somewhat empty for him. notes: * after alto explained his love of flying to her, ranka understands it logically, but still doesnt share his passion for it in any sense. he however did awaken a dormant passion for flight in sheryl, which is why she connects with him so well. all it took was that first unscheduled excursion in the concert hall - no wordy explanation necessary. ** this assumes that she managed to get that far in her courses at mihoshi before all the crap started happening **

my thoughts exactly... think of the shock the NUNS would have upon encountering a hostile force that uses SDF class vessels that use attacker mode ^^. although I dont really see how megaroad-1 descendants could be made into a hostile force at present.

yes... something about the pic of minmay in bilrer's ring tells me that we may at some point see a macross series set around finding out the fate of the megaroad. such a tale would not have to deal with the original characters much at all beyond brief flashbacks or log entries. perhaps we will find the megaroad colony, or perhaps the roles will be reversed, with the megaroad colony coming back to find us, as some point in the future when all the original characters can be presumed to have passed into legend. heh think about it... a character from the megaroad colony recalling his first history lessons about hikaru, misa and minmay from when he was in 3rd grade...

I also happen to have every confidence that the rest of GA is out there somewhere, whether or not grace was eliminated. it is very unlikely that they would have bothered to be onsite for the big show when they could just be there virtually.

geez... am I the only one here who was both enthralled by the final ep and disgusted that it all wrapped up so quickly? honestly, I loved how the series wrapped it's more important plot points up, but still think they should have had at least 11 to 14 more eps to give all the plot points decent service before the finale. the material was certainly there to support a 36-39 episode series, and they could have had at least one more OST release out of it. the amount of money they missed out on making is simply staggering oh well... at least we now know what sheryl's hair looks like when she isn't excercising control over it thanks to her bird-human blood type - I have every confidence that her multi-spectral hair is natural... just not her default setting ^^. so Ranka isn't the only one with el neato hair abilities...

well, at least we now know that Sheryl's true(st) hair color is the same as granny Mao - when she collapsed on the BF stage and was near death, her hair reverted to something similar to Mao's. when Ranka revived her, it came back to its' multi-spectral goodness. perhaps this is the most important unanswered question of frontier - is sheryl's unusual hair coloring a product of her mixed human/bird-human blood or is it a holographic projection? (I am thinking the former) if Sheryl can possibly change her hair color at will, all I can say is hot diggity, cuz her hair in its' darker state makes her look downright exotic (it brings out the mayan in her lol)

like i said way back somewhere in the single digit pages... hime is EVA in his ex-gear right now. either he is gonna make like a small piece of debris (mac+ Isamu style) to sneak his way past the vajra lines, or somehow is gonna be in just the right spot to be picked up by the quarter when it arrives so he can hop into his true ride and go pwn certain ppl. thats my theory and I'm sticking to it

hmmm.. it wouldnt be the first time politics spelled the doom of a superior aircraft design - look at the F-104 starfighter... if kelley johnson had been able to get the funding for it's successor, we might not have the aircraft we know as the F-15 eagle. scuttlebutt had it that KJ's design would have literally flown rings around the Eagle, but that due to political fallout from the F-104's success overseas (which the Air Force hated just as much as that the manned missile proved to be adaptable to just about any mission put to it, including carrying nuclear bombs) it couldnt garner any support for development. can you tell that Kelley Johnson was one of my heroes of the cold-war era? you dont see many guys able to take a design like the U-2 or SR-71 from a diner napkin sketch to fully functional prototype inside 12 months anymore... at any price.

well... according to old aerodynamic theories, bees couldnt fly... there have been breakthroughs in the last decade in terms of the understanding of how insect wings operate - bees in particular are able to warp their wings such that they are able to generate positive lift on both the up and down strokes. in all though, I have to say that power is the principal problem with a valk. once that gets beaten, we might just see them - although I doubt they would ever be used in large numbers... more as a specops mecha, where their versatility would be an asset. remember that there are fusion reactions that dont produce hard radiation, and reactors like the bussard polywell could be made quite compact. the rest is all materials and computing power.

meh there is absolutely