Seto Kaiba

By any objective standard of measure, the VF-31 Siegfried is a more advanced, higher performance variable fighter than the Sv-262 Draken III. The Draken III may have more raw thrust, but it's also a noticeably heavier aircraft than the VF-31 Custom. Its fold quartz reheat system provides a much greater increase in engine output than the VF-31 Custom's fold wave system does (25/30% vs. the Siegfried's 15%) but it's not quite enough to offset the difference in mass in the T/W ratio math on the mass production model, so the Siegfried maintains a slight advantage even when they're both overboosting. That has always been my interpretation. I'm not even sure it's because the Aerial Knights are even really that good, since the New UN Spacy starts clobbering them despite flying old Block II VF-171s once King Ketchup is no longer mind-controlling everyone. Xaos' PMC division as a whole seems to be a bush league operation compared to Strategic Military Services. Delta Flight is their elite, but it really feels like they're only elite compared to the company's other, decidedly lackluster troops. The Kingdom of the Wind's Aerial Knights, at least, are professional soldiers who've trained most of their lives to fly and fight. Even the ones who trained before the war of independence expected to serve most of their lives in the Knights, and many of the ones who joined during or after the war's end are driven by a desire for revenge against a hated enemy. Plus, y'know, they have naturally superior abilities in addition to being driven as hell and training like mad.

Nothing substantive, no. The explanation that Discovery producer Nicholas Meyer gave amounts to an overlong "because we could". Buried in some of the extraneous waffle of those interviews are a few statements that point to the showrunners opting for a prequel because they didn't want to deal with the high-minded morality and idealism of Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek. Gene's utopian vision of the future apparently wasn't conflict-friendly enough for all the dark, gritty, racist, paranoid trash the producers wanted their show to be about... so they went looking for gaps in the prime timeline before TOS to exploit, claiming that they were looking to depict the slow development towards that ideal. Unfortunately, because the producers waited until much later to bother actually researching any of the prime timeline they seem to have picked their date based on events of the Kelvin timeline (the start of Jar-Jar's first Star Trek movie) without realizing that the rampant militarism of Jar-Jar's riff on Star Trek never happened in the prime timeline because the Narada's unintentional trip back in time created a parallel universe. So we've got this bizarre, incongruously militaristic Star Trek title trying to set up shop in a prime timeline in a period where that utopian Federation civilization that the producers insist doesn't exist yet had already been a thing for a little over 95 years. They could, but I think the writers are a bit put out by the way The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager went and kneecapped or outright exterminated every established hostile power that could credibly threaten the United Federation of Planets. Deep Space Nine arguably started it by putting the Cardassians, who had been a credible threat on the Federation's border for much of The Next Generation's later seasons, Cardassian Union was on the brink of collapse even before it joined the Dominion. The Dominion War arc saw the Dominion itself beaten and forced to surrender, and it took the Breen Confederacy and Cardassian Union with it when it went, with the latter suffering a friendly-fire genocide, and the technically-friendly Klingon Empire and Romulan Star Empire both got mauled worse than the Federation did. The Next Generation movies took another Dominion ally, the Son'a, out of the picture entirely and started the Borg Collective's badass decay, then delivered the first of two knockout punches to the Romulan Star Empire in Nemesis by having the entire Senate assassinated and a Reman-led coup install a short-lived praetor as dictator. Then they accidentally blew up a neighboring star and the Romulan home system got wiped out, so they're no threat. The main anti-Federation faction that existed in the Klingon Empire also lost its leadership, almost as an aside, in Generations when the Duras sisters were killed. Voyager introduced a pack of mostly-useless antagonists like the Kazon (Klingons Lite) and Vidiians who would only have rated as nuisances were it not for the titular ship being alone and perpetually short of resources. They ran with First Contact's mistreatment of the Borg and reduced them from The Dreaded to just "the dreadful" before capping it with "Janeway's b*tch". Species 8472 was the only other really credible antagonist they brought, and they just wanted to be left the hell alone by the Borg. So who's left? Basically, it's just a few formerly antagonistic powers that are at least on somewhat friendly terms with the Federation in that period. The Gorn Hegemony, the Tholian Assembly, the Sheliak Corporate, and the Tzenkethi. (This is probably why the relaunch novels try so damned hard to come up with new antagonistic powers and generally fail miserably, thus falling back on rehashing stuff from the shows. The best they could do was having a bunch of minor antagonists band together to form their own evil Federation, the Typhon Pact.)

Alas, no... all we know about the Sv-154 Svard is: The Sv-154 is a product of the SV Works, a design team established by former Sv-51 and VF-4 design team member, and General Galaxy co-founder, Alexei Kurakin as a pet project that was developing variable fighters designed to defeat other variable fighters rather than Zentradi and other alien threats. (The SV is for "Slayer Valkyrie" or "Slayer of Valkyries". Alexei seems like the kind of guy who probably listened to a lot of metal music.) The team was sold off to Dian Cecht, an Epsilon Foundation subsidiary, at some point. Consequently, the Sv-154 is almost certainly an anti-VF VF. Strong circumstantial evidence from Macross Delta: the Black-Winged White Knight makes the Sv-154 likely a 4th Generation-equivalent main variable fighter rivaling the performance of the General Galaxy VF-171-II Nightmare Plus. Given that the design is a tweaked reuse of the LV-7 Valorous Rapier "Excalibur" from Shoji Kawamori's Air Cavalry Chronicles1, it likely had a big f***-off sword. That's a pretty straightforward bit, actually. The VF-19's many weird variants are mostly just stand-alone designs, barring a few that were intended to test technology for the YF-25 Prophecy. The 5th Generation is super simple, the only bit that's a bit convoluted to draw is the relationship between the VF-25 and YF-29 since the YF-29 airframe is based on the YF-25's but they were developed at the same time but the VF-25/TW-1 is also a testbed for the YF-29's aerodynamics and weaponry and oh no I've gone crosseyed. The Strike's beam cannon was an anti-capital ship weapon, not intended for dogfighting. That Roy was able to use it in dogfights is actually pretty darn impressive. I'm not sure the Stampede had a more powerful beam weapon than the Strike, but then those FamilySoft games were all kinds of odd when it came to mechanical design. They tried a few different times to add a new "super" fighter to the First Space War era, the other big one being the VF-X3 Medusa, a nightmare cobbled together from Destroid and VF-1A parts. "Do you want 200,000 row spreadsheets? Because that's how you get 200,000 row spreadsheets." For the time being, my translation notes are partly handwritten, but mostly an ever-expanding set of indexed and annotated Microsoft Word documents detailing every variant I've come across so far. I even briefly engaged the services of a college student from the local uni's foreign language dept. to speed up data entry. Unfortunately, she is also terrified of my pets, so we kind of have to ring-fence her while she works. 1. Shoji Kawamori's Air Cavalry Chronicles was both a further development of the unrealized non-Macross series Advanced Valkyrie - the plot of which would go on to become Macross Plus - but also an early version of his fantasy work The Vision of Escaflowne before it became a fantasy series. The factions and plot spun off into another genre, and the mechanical designs were absorbed into Macross in Macross 7, Macross M3, and the Macross VF-X series. The LV-7 Valorous Rapier was a mecha of the Fanelian royal guard in that incarnation.

I am a translator, not a masochist. (I know there's not a lot of difference between the two sometimes, but there IS a key distinction there somewhere! When I figure out what it is, I'll let you know.) I'm thinking it needs more incense... because everything's nice and linear and logical until you get to the VF-1 Valkyrie Plus and the parallel development of the VF-4 and VF-3000 by Stonewell/Bellcom and it turns into a wire diagram of somebody's plate of spaghetti napolitan. No matter how I draw this (attempt fourteen, btw) design lineages result in lines crossing throughout the 2nd Generation programs and leading into the third thanks to General Galaxy (probably in the person of Alexi Kurakin) drawing inspiration for the VF-14 from the VF-4. At least things'll straighten out once I get past the 4th Generation and it all becomes a nice linear tree from the YF-24 on. In retrospect, I should use a dry erase board for this... I'm wasting a LOT of paper.

On a lark, I started trying to draw an actual VF "Family Tree" like a more detailed version of Macross Chronicle Technology Sheet 01Q while I was bored on a conference call an hour or so ago... ave deus mechanicus this is hard. I've had to start over eight nine times, and I'm not even past the second generation yet! I literally screwed up again while I was writing this.

Not just variety, quantity too... with the four pylon wing configuration, the Strike Valkyrie can carry more missiles than the Stampede. With four UUM-7 missile pods, the Strike's got 68 to the SDP-1's 64... or up to 86 under the later/larger HMMP-02 loadings. (Plus it's worth noting that our numbers for the HMMP-02 micro-missile launcher option pack are based on the official art from the Macross: Do You Remember Love? Data Bank book, though an assortment of secondary sources including Variable Fighter Master File have suggested that later variants of the HMMP-02 increased the capacity of the launcher from 12 to the 20 missiles which several model kits and toys have shown.) The general vibe the Stampede gives off is that of a sort of halfway stage to the Armored Valkyrie that doesn't sacrifice the ability to transform.

The proximity of the Beta Quadrant is one of the few things in that episode that doesn't fly in the face of established Star Trek lore. Kind of a rare "shown the work" moment. Everybody always forgets the United Federation of Planets straddles the border of the Alpha and Beta quadrants, as do a few of the other major powers like the Klingons and the Romulans... the writers included. Sulu's Excelsior was on its way back from a three year stint mapping anomalies there when they observed the detonation of Praxis at the start of Star Trek VI, and the informed observer who's quick with the freeze-frame button will note a bunch of major worlds are actually Beta quadrant planets... including Qo'nos. (The old Star Trek Encyclopedia and some Expanded Universe lore put Vulcan, Andoria, Orion, Rigel, Axanar, Efro Delta, Nausicaa, Ba'ku, Acamar, Yridia, and Zakdorn in the Beta quadrant. The show's tendency to forget the Beta quadrant gets lampshaded in Star Trek: Titan when someone attempts to give a rousing speech and it ends rather lamely with "But let's remember, people, it was our pure exploration that found the Caeliar and saved the whole damn Alpha Quadrant. And...and Beta. You guys from Beta know what I mean".)

Maybe they misunderstood when Starfleet Command called them a pack of "raving bloody loonies"... so they decided the ship should be lit like a rave.

Not a legal one, no... and we try not to link to pirated content here.

Roy's? He's always had the Skull One. It's the only VF he had in the series. Y'sure you don't mean Kakizaki or Max?

Nah, fold bacteria don't do anything like that... they just give you space AIDS and maybe turn you into a subspace ansible. Very VERY unhappy with this series so far. This is shaping up to be exactly the same kind of lame, wannabe-grimdark bullcrap as Star Trek: Into Darkness. They're trying SO GODDAMN HARD to be edgy and cool that it's just cringeworthy... it's like the Section 31 novels featuring Julian Bashir, but without the crucial self-awareness about precisely how stupid and cliche delivering Bond one-liners and ends-justify-the-means speeches are. One thing is pretty clear at this point... Starfleet, and particularly the crew of the Discovery, are the villains of the piece. It's not even an ignorant malice like Janeway's destabilization of half the Delta Quadrant in her unhinged rampage back to Earth or some World's Unluckiest Crew bullshit like both Riker's USS Titan and Vaughn's USS Defiant got in the relaunch novels. Hell, the main character's a paranoid xenophobe who saw no problem at all with assaulting her commanding officer and staging a one-man mutiny because her CO refused to commit a war crime by ordering her ship to launch an unprovoked attack on a foreign power's ships in nominally neutral space. She also seems to be little troubled by the notion that she started an interstellar war with the Klingon Empire that had claimed over eight thousand lives to date. If anything, her new boss Captain Malfoy seems to be out to get her looking like the good guy by being an even more obvious villain. At least Burnham's moral compass is only defective... Lorca's doesn't seem to have been installed at all. It's like David 8 by way of Garth of Izar, he's a self-proclaimed King who openly believes to be above the law and has earmarked Burnham for great things in his service precisely because she's shown she'll compromise her morals and throw the ethics handbook out the nearest airlock the minute it's convenient for her. It's definitely a Star Trek for a new age... an age of hate and fear... and it turns my stomach.

Presumably because the guns are much more overbuilt-looking on this version, and the missiles are built-in rather than mounted out on the wings. In practical terms, it's actually less weaponry than a properly-outfitted Strike Valkyrie.

's more impressive-looking than actually impressive... it's basically just a Strike Valkyrie with less weaponry. A single large-bore charged particle beam cannon, a 35mm rotary cannon, and sixty-four missiles.

It doesn't really show that, though... the VF-1 was already completed at the time Macross Zero is set. The story's not really all that vague, it's just not a stand-alone story. You need to have seen Macross 7 to make sense of some of the Protoculture-relevant plot points in the OVA... and it had basically nothing to do with the origin of VFs. In fact, at the point the OVA is set the VF-1 design had already been frozen for protection and the VF-0s had been removed from testing for use as training planes while manufacturers were tooling up to begin mass production. Not really... most of the technologies that went into the VF-31 were developed after the VF-0.

Really? I've never heard anyone say Star Trek: the Motion Picture didn't feel like Star Trek. I've heard lots of legitimate complaints about the writing, but most of those are because the movie felt like exactly what it was... the script for a Star Trek Phase II pilot stretched so thin to fit the movie's runtime that you could practically see daylight through the plot. It was a problem exacerbated by the way the movie was edited, and addressed later on with the director's cut. Considering the complaints you identified, you might be thinking of Star Trek: Enterprise... which was generally lambasted for its crappy writing, disregard for continuity, excessively dark tone and action emphasis, and its technological inconsistencies not only by its viewers but also by the show's creative staff and cast. Discovery is just proving that the franchise isn't learning from the mistakes that sank Enterprise. IIRC, it wasn't just fan dislike of them that sank the TMP uniforms... the cast apparently found them hideously uncomfortable to wear, particularly while sitting. The "belt buckle" bit tended to cut into the stomach and groin... Yeah, that was the way they stretched the plot, which had originally been a Phase II concept story written for a ~50 minute runtime.

Seeing the summaries of the third episode, it's pretty bloody apparent what it feels like... this is Star Trek viewed through the lens of Warhammer 40,000. Not only are the Klingons taking wardrobe tips from the Dark Eldar, apparently experimental stardrives in Discovery are verging on an unshielded warp jump for mutation value. Having read the Section 31 novels in the Relaunch novel continuity, I would once have felt sure that no new Star Trek series could ever be as bad or as corny as those... and I am rapidly revising that opinion in the face of Discovery. Even then, Deep Space Nine kept a very anti-war message the entire time they were doing the Dominion War arc and broke it up heavily with more traditional Trek content so the series wouldn't get bogged down in it. Voyager did the same thing when the audience started to tire of the hostile alien of the week formula and they went for the Borg as a new recurring antagonist. They kept it light, avoiding confrontation whenever possible, and breaking it up with lots of lighter stories. They realized their mistake in Enterprise, and the Xindi War arc's poor reception led to them shifting the focus back to more traditional Trek exploration and science-y stuff for the 4th and planned 5th seasons. Discovery so far seems to be putting on the grimdark as much as possible in the hopes that CG action sequences will cover the pathetically weak writing. 's a frakking Dark Eldar warp beast!

That's a bit morbid, isn't it? In the Robotech version, the Southern Cross Army only had a couple of months to pick up the pieces after the bloodbath of their war with the Tirolians before the Invid got to Earth and absolutely massacred them with only a handful escaping into space. (Kind of a head-scratcher too... who'd handle a recruitment campaign when their entire command structure ended up vaporized?) ... now THAT is just perverse. She's the reason they lost the war in both the original SDC Southern Cross AND Robotech! The word's been spread to a few Facebook groups, but so far no serious show of interest.

Nah, the Klingons in previous Star Trek shows might've been channeling Brian Blessed circa Blackadder season one with all of their grandiose speeches about honor and battle, but there was always an internal logic to their bluster once their more reserved Soviet Russia allegory ran its course in Star Trek VI: the Undiscovered Country. Star Trek: Discovery's Klingons don't seem to have any real consistency to their bluster. It's a lot of impressive-sounding crap, but none of it seems to actually mean anything... especially given that they don't seem to be following any of the established Klingon cultural norms.

But they weren't producing sense... just a lot of bluster and loud noises.

's probably a fan attempt to promote the Southern Cross Army mecha from their D-list apparatus status in Robotech. The Auroran was supposed to be the new hotness in Southern Cross when it was introduced late in the conflict with the Zor to replace the Logan that "word of god" in a small number of official publications says was ineffectual bordering on useless. Robotech canon makes the Southern Cross Army mecha out to be badly designed, inferior hardware across the board but doesn't really explain why outside of the Palladium RPG (which just blames RT's version of Claude Leon). (A total suckerpunch to the Auroran, which was supposed to be the most advanced and capable mecha humanity had at the time in Southern Cross...) ... eh? But Marie is from Glorie, and the Logan and Auroran are both unique to Glorie's military. (Jeanne, IIRC, is an immigrant from Liberte... and IIRC didn't Liberte's reinforcements accomplish the square root of bloody nothing?)

Probably don't need to include YF airframes in it, since by definition those would belong to the same generation as the completed design (unless no completed design exists or the design number ended up changed). Just as well, most of those are nigh-impossible to classify. Oh boy, here I go rantin' again!1 For the sake of convenience, the following rant will be color-coded! VFs that officially exist and have appeared in a Macross official setting work VFs that officially exist and have NOT appeared in a Macross official setting work. VFs that exist solely in non-official works like Variable Fighter Master File VFs whose placement is speculative. Generation 0 - "Prototype Generation" This generation is purely speculative and exists mainly to segregate designs that do not fully comply with the design qualifications for the First Generation Variable Fighter (e.g. thermonuclear reaction turbine engines) and were built principally for evaluation purposes rather than mass produced for actual combat service. YVF-X-0 VF-0 Phoenix (YVF-X-0B) VF-0-NF Sv-50 Sv-51 Sv-51Σ (Unmanned Sv-51) Sv-51Ω (Repurposed incomplete Sv-52 with conventional engines) Generation 0.5 - "Upgraded Prototype Generation" This generation contains designs that exist only in Variable Fighter Master File. These VF designs are upgrades of the 0th Generation prototypes that were upgraded with technology from 1st Generation VFs or otherwise modernized to make them viable for long-duration operation. VF-0+ Phoenix Plus VF-0 Replica (Macross 30) Sv-51 Replica (Macross 30) Generation 1 - "First Generation" The defining traits of this generation are the adoption of Overtechnology, including thermonuclear reaction turbine engines, laser weaponry, energy converting armor, etc. in a production variable fighter. Sv-52 VF-1 Valkyrie VF-X-2 Generation 1.5 - "Upgraded First Generation" First Generation designs upgraded with Second Generation hardware drawn from the VF-4. VF-1 Valkyrie Plus (Blocks 6 and later, incl. VF-1X) VF-3000S Crusader VF-3000B Generation 2 - "Specialization for Emigrant Fleets" The hallmarks of the Second Generation designs include the adoption of Zentradi overtechnology, refinements for regime-optimized performance in either atmosphere or space, "lessons learned" from the First Space War, and optionally the adoption of particle beam weaponry. Most were intended for use by emigrant fleets, with low cost, simplified manufacturing, and parts-sharing. VF-X-3 VF-4 Lightning III VF-3000S Crusader VF-3000B VF-5000 Star Mirage VF-5 VF-6 VF-7 VF-9 Cutlass VF-X-10 V-BR-2 VA-X-3 Generation 2.5 - "Upgraded Second Generation" Second Generation VFs that were modernized to keep them in service alongside Third Generation VFs. VF-4G Lightning III VF-5000G Star Mirage VF-9E Cutlass Generation 3 - "Project Nova and Diversification" The Third Generation VFs are defined chiefly by the Project Nova design contest that decided the generation's main variable fighter as a true all-purpose successor to the VF-1 Valkyrie, but also by the continuing diversification of variable craft design into dedicated Attacker and Bomber roles. VF-11A/B/C/D Thunderbolt VF-14 Vampire VF-15 VF-17A-C Nightmare VA-14 VAB-2 VA-3 VA-110 Variable Glaug VB-6 Generation 3.5 - "Upgraded Third Generation" Third Generation VFs that've been modernized or upgraded with technology drawn from Fourth Generation VFs to keep them viable or evaluate technologies meant for Fourth Generation implementation. VF-11MAXL Thunderbolt VF-11C Thunderbolt Interceptor VF-16 VF-17D/S/T Nightmare XVF-19 (a modified VF-11) Fz-109 Elgersoln Az-130 Panzersoln FBz-99 Zaubergern Generation 4 - "Project Super Nova: the Advanced Variable Fighter" The Fourth Generation's distinctive design traits are among the best known in Macross. The adoption of the next-gen ARIEL airframe control AI, thermonuclear reaction burst turbine engines, fighter-scale pinpoint barrier systems, and native compatibility for fold boosters. This generation was largely defined by Project Super Nova, the ultimately futile contest between the YF-19 and YF-21 at Eden's New Edwards Test Flight Center. The insurmountable technological and performance complications of the two designs led to a third design, the VF-171, becoming this generation's main variable fighter. VF-19 Excalibur YF-21 VF-22 Sturmvogel II VF-171 Nightmare Plus VB-171 Nightmare Plus RVF-171 Nightmare Plus Sv-154 Svard Feios Valkyrie Fz-109G Elgersoln Gustaf Generation 4.5 - "Upgraded Fourth Generation" The Generation 4.5 designs are few, and consist mostly of VF designs that were either upgraded to evaluate tech for eventual adoption by Generation 5 designs, or ones that were upgraded in extremis to make them more effective in combat against the Vajra. VF-19ACTIVE Nothung VF-19EF Caliburn VF-19EF/A Excalibur ADVANCE VF-22HG Schwalbe Zwei VF-171-IIIF Nightmare Plus VF-171EX Nightmare Plus Queadluun Alma Generation 5 - "Project Evolution and Decentralized Development" The Fifth Generation of Variable Fighters started development as a response to the disastrous first contact with the insectoid alien race known as the Vajra. Existing VF designs proved utterly inadequate to rival the performance of Vajra drones, and new programs were launched to develop countermeasures for the high-g forces and other major problems with the newly finalized Fourth Generation. The hallmarks of the Fifth Generation are the adoption of fold quartz-based technology like the Inertia Store Converter, Fold Wave System, and Fold Dimensional Resonance System, as well as new technologies like linear actuators, Stage II thermonuclear reaction turbine engines, ARIEL II airframe control AIs, EX-Gear cockpits, advanced energy conversion armor, and heavy quantum beam weaponry. YF-24 YF-24 Evolution VF-24 YF-25 Prophecy VF-25 Messiah YF-26 YF-27 Shahar VF-27 Lucifer YF-28 (Existence speculative) YF-29 Durandal YF-29B Percival (NUNS Ver.) YF-30 Chronos YF-30B Chronos (NUNS Ver.) VF-31 Kairos VF-31 Custom "Siegfried" Sv-262 Draken III Queadluun Alma 1. If you could read that in the voice of Krombopulos Michael from Rick and Morty, that'd be great.

Looks to be a Legioss and an Auroran, yeah... fanart of the Robotech version of MOSPEADA's Major Jonathan, who that adaptation made into someone who came back to fight the show's version of the Zor instead of between the Inbit occupation's start and 2nd recapture op.

Well, I've got two potential groups I can advertise this on... potentially three if I can get permission from the admin there. Hopefully that will net a few interested parties, esp. since fans of Palladium's RPG are plentiful on at least two of the three and there's more love for Southern Cross among the RPG fans than anywhere else. Noted. The groups I was going to advertise it on have no love for the "Empire" too, so that should help keep entanglements out of it.

Destroids are a dead-end mechanical concept in the Macross setting... the only way they'd be able to do that would be if they did it during the Unification Wars when destroids were still a viable battlefield concept, and that wouldn't make for lighthearted viewing. That'd be the kind of Gundam-esque, soul-crushing despair-a-thon with Cheyenne and Tomahawk series destroids squaring off against (and massacring) main battle tanks and infantry. (Think MS IGLOO 2: Gravity Front's second episode.) After the First Space War, destroids are basically only useful for target practice and industrial machinery. Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu just capitalized on the lighthearted fish-out-of-water comedy from Full Metal Panic!'s first story arc for a breather before the second arc (animated as Full Metal Panic! the Second Raid) kicked off and subsequently all-but-annihilated humor in favor of Cerberus Syndrome... which Full Metal Panic! Invisible Victory is going to continue in its adaptation of the lead-in to the third, final, and darkest story arc of the lot. Macross has always had at least some humor and strictly-humor breather episodes, so it wouldn't be a stretch to stick a Fumoffu-style series out there. (I insist Macross 7 WAS a Fumoffu-style joke series half the time.) Well, that's entirely down to who's writing it... the annoying part is that the OTHER authors working on Macross Delta for stuff like manga did a much better job with its cast than the guys writing the show. Macross Delta: the Black-Winged White Knight does SO MUCH to make the Aerial Knights actually developed and interesting... These shows are aimed predominantly at high schoolers, so they're naturally going to try to make the main character young enough to be relatable to the audience. The... adaptation... aged up many of the characters arbitrarily, but accidentally locked others into younger ages or retroactively made relationships creepy and even criminal. IIRC the only ones for whom there was enough info to surmise ages were their version of Minmay and their version of Jeanne Francaix.

Granted, but whether the show actually capitalizes on it is another matter entirely... Like how Macross Delta tried to portray the New UN Spacy brass as shady and untrustworthy but it all fell flat when their shady, untrustworthy behavior was nothing more than taking a realistic response to the crisis at hand. They were supposed to be dickbags just because they were in authority, never mind that they were doing more good than the protagonists...