DeeBot

In time, you'll come to realize that this opens up the field for KlanForever.

I think it might be possible that the Vajra are (mostly) non-intelligent after all. However, they may be strongly empathic, meaning that they'd feel and react to the emotions of those they encounter. The more the inhabitants of Frontier hate the Vajra, the stronger the Vajra feed off that hate, and become more aggressive themselves. Rather than being evil/malicious, they're simply a reflection of our own worst tendencies, become physically manifest. That could be the true terror of the Vajra. (Of course, Grace would have needed to kick the cycle off.) This might have something to do with the emotion index Grace measures on the fold transmissions from Ranka's singing, and why she's so eager to encourage hate for the Vajra. In the end, the only way to stop the cycle is for the Frontier side to learn to let go of their hate, and become flower children or something. I'm a bit loathe to accept this theory entirely, but I think some sort of empathic feedback mechanism may play a role in some of the Vajra's behavior. It may not entirely be some sort of rational defense response.

I think .

Yup! I don't know if it'll play out like that, but EDIT: HorribleRaw is done seeding.

Well, we also get the impression that Alto could be better than Michel, if he really tried, but he's just plain reckless. Which is one of the reasons why Michel needles him incessantly. Besides, in combat, Michel mainly just sits back and picks off targets from a distance. He's not really a dogfighter, which presumably takes more piloting skill.

The surprise ending is that Alto chooses Nanase, who he reveals he's been dating the whole time.

Yack! Pineapple buffet!

This episode was pure win for me the moment The awesome just continued through the whole episode. I'm not sure if Next episode: Anyway, it's nice to see

mms://waryas.ath.cx/live is working fine for me. And OMG!

We're pretty much assured from the future episode summaries that at least survive the next episode, and probably the next two after it, too. Speculation is pretty much restricted to other characters, at least in the near future.

That's a great question, but first, think about the question from the opposite angle. Let's say normal human society are the macros, and let's say there's an intelligent society of ants that are the micros. Now, a single human being requires a lot more resources to sustain than a single ant, but the human being is also capable of producing a lot more stuff to support himself. Similarly, I would expect Zentrans to be great at, say, hippocow farming. (And in fact, if the Zentradi can produce large amounts of meat in a more economical fashion, it follows that regular human beings will benefit from the lower prices. This will enrich the Zentradi, carving out their economic niche, while bankrupting less productive human ranchers.) Of course, mechanization throws a monkey wrench in this simple analysis (there's no reason to believe miclones aren't competitive in agriculture), but it could apply to other things that require physical labor.

Personally, I think Nanase biting the dust is more likely than Michael doing so. But that's just a gut feeling.

I like MKVs because I can turn the subtitles off. Can't do that with AVI (unless you're using soft subs there, too, and then you have the inconvenience of an extra sub file). MKVs can also have multiple audio and subtitle tracks (video, too, but who really needs that?). In short, MKVs are much better containers for anything with DVD-like features. I've also been pretty impressed with the visual quality of ASS format subs. My Macross F viewing computer is a 1.7 Ghz Athlon laptop with GeForce 6100 integrated video, and it plays perfectly smoothly. Granted, I can't do anything else at the same time... but it does play smoothly. Really, I'm pretty sure most of these complaints have almost nothing to do with the MKV format itself, and are almost entirely due to trying to watch high definition H.264 video. Other codecs like XviD/DivX (which are much more common in AVI hard sub encodes, from what I've seen) are easier to decode, and lower resolution encodes also help. Overlaying the soft subs has some overhead, but it's really pretty insignificant compared to the rest of the decoding process.

I interpreted it as Alto figuratively flipping Sheryl the bird because she'd been so stubborn earlier. "Forget you and your drama, I'm declaring my undying love for Ranka." The problem with this interpretation is that it would require Alto to realize both of the girls' feelings for him (which he seems willfully ignorant of), so I think I'm probably wrong. But it made the most sense to me at the time. On the other hand, I took the RANKA to be a routine part of the stunt sequence, as a declaration of love for Ranka from the Frontier citizens, rather than from Alto in particular. (And of course, Ranka then misinterpreted it.) I think Alto still had something to prove to Sheryl, but I'm not exactly sure what. He's still pretty much in denial about the girls having feelings for him, so... no idea. I still think it's more likely that it was a defiant gesture, rather than a romantic one. Perhaps he was mad at Sheryl for being involved in his brother's plans, and was asserting that he'd stick with his plans of flying. The tiff between Sheryl and Alto seems based on the fact that Sheryl decided to stop singing, and Alto can't believe that she's giving up like that. Whatever message he's trying to send to Sheryl must be related to this. In the preview: I'm particularly intrigued with the last shot of Michel and Klan. An explosion seems to go off somewhere nearby. I originally thought they might be flying together, but maybe they're just sitting somewhere inside the city while the fighting rages on. Michel's in his EX-Gear, while Klan seems rather underdressed? Since I doubt there are macronized EX-Gears, I assume Klan's in her micronized form. Klan seems pretty well covered up most of the time, so that drew a few puzzled glances from me. I really think we're going to see multiple major characters die in the coming episode. We've been faked out a couple times before, but that only tends to strengthen my belief that things are going to take a seriously dark turn soon. Also: As suspected, Leon doesn't seem to know Grace's full plans with regards to the Vajra. He sees the dimension eater weapons as the means to hold the Vajra off for a long time (almost seems to get a hard-on from it), which I'm sure isn't part of Grace's plans at all. Meanwhile, he seems like a kid in the candy store about finally getting permission to off Glass and declare martial law. This probably plays into Grace's designs, too. I wonder how long Leon will be running things before Grace stabs him in the back.

Before we run too far off the rails with our speculation, I went ahead and created a new thread to discuss dimension eater physics.

This is a bit simplistic (and the whole business about black holes sucking is another big misconception). First off, a black hole is defined by its event horizon, the (3-D) surface where nothing can escape. A photon of light that hit the event horizon at a glancing angle would circle around the event horizon forever. Any photon angled slightly in, or any object traveling slower than light, would fall into the black hole. Passing the event horizon, the laws of physics still apply as usual, but you can't back out due to the gravitational pull. At the center of the black hole is the singularity, where the curvature goes to infinity. This is mostly a mathematical artifact of the theory (caused by division by zero, hence the term "singularity"); we have no way to know if a singularity is a real object or not. Some quantum gravity theories tend to believe that real singularities can't exist. It doesn't matter, though, because nothing past the event horizon can effect the rest of the universe. Finally, black holes don't suck (or at least, they don't suck any more than any other kind of massive object, like the Sun or a neutron star). At a sufficient distance from a black hole, they act exactly like a Newtonian point object of the same mass. Closer in, you need to take general relativity into account, but there's still no dramatically increased sucking action. As I said, the laws of physics don't change at the event horizon, so general relativity applies almost down to the very center. Gravitationally, the only special thing about a black hole is its density. And the only reason that matters is that the field strength can keep increasing as you get closer to it. With normal objects, you start passing through them before you get close enough for the field strength to keep shooting up. At the same distance from two objects of the same mass, density is irrelevant. That was my point: Black holes are said to "have no hair". They basically have three properties: mass, charge, and angular momentum (how much "spin" they have). It doesn't matter what you put into a black hole, so compressing a pineapple down to the size of a quark is a perfectly legitimate way to go about making one. This is quite simply untrue. No micro black holes have ever been created (by man, at any rate), and we don't even possess the technology yet. Some theories postulate that the LHC (which hasn't come online yet) may be able to create micro black holes, but other theories think that the LHC doesn't have enough energy to do it. If you can find a reference backing up your assertion that micro black holes have already been created, I'd be happy to change my mind. But to my knowledge, this hasn't happened, and was actually the subject of some controversy due to sensationalized speculation that the LHC would create such things and gobble the Earth up. (Of course, as you pointed you, they wouldn't.) This is abusing the equations. One of the central results of electromagnetics is that the total flux through a surface depends only on the amount of enclosed charge. The "strength" of equal amounts of charge is always the same (though this is abusing the terminology), though it may be more diffuse or more concentrated on some parts of the surface. Assuming perfect symmetry, though, a spherical charge volume and a point charge volume have the exact same field strength at any given distance. Yes, you can get closer to a point charge than a spherical charge, but you're really comparing apples and oranges then. If you're inside of a spherical charge, the effective charge is only that fraction of the charge which is enclosed by a sphere at the radius you're at. A point charge retains all of its flux, while a spherical charge will gradually drop off to 0 as you approach the center, because there's less charge inside the enclosing surface. If you squeeze the spherical charge down, though, it will have the exact same strength as an equivalent point charge, all the way down to zero (when they become the same thing). That's comparing apples to apples. From a sufficient distance (beyond the surface of the spherical charge), however, it's irrelevant because both the point charge and spherical charge are completely enclosed. (And in fact, the same result does hold for gravity.) Sorry I'm being so hard on you over this (and I'm not an expert in the field, either, so I'm sure there's plenty of room to point out mistakes or misconceptions of my own), but the persistent misinformation in popular culture about black holes really gets my goat. I always got the impression that a big bite was taken out of it. But I think we mostly concluded back then that we couldn't conclude anything from the depiction of Galia 4 at the beginning of episode 14. Still, I don't think what we saw the DE do was exactly like a black hole. Some of the effects were probably similar, but I still think it's a fold-related phenomena. It really reminds me of the mis-fold that took a chunk of South Ataria Island off with the original Macross. Only scaled really, really far up. I think this idea has a lot of merit to it. A DE weapon would likely still be incredibly destructive in physical terms, but the knock-on effect, if it does disrupt Vajra communications, could be even more potent. Mod edit: 2-week rule added. Thread closes on August 31st.

You might also recall that letting the Zentradi do all their fighting for them is what ultimately led to the downfall of the Protoculture.

Err, I certainly hope they weren't anything like Sheryl's "hopes and dreams"... They eat dimensions, obviously. Black holes don't quite work that way. If you took a pineapple and compressed it until it became a black hole, it would still only have the mass (and gravitational pull) of a pineapple. The only thing that changes is that the pineapple becomes an incredibly tiny dot. Also, the strong force binds quarks into protons/neutrons/etc. The strong force can't cause gravitational collapse because of quantum exclusion--particles can only get so close together before their quantum states would overlap, and the strong force doesn't cause collapse (otherwise, particles would spontaneously collapse in everyday life). The only real way to create black holes is to either pile a lot of mass together (like in a collapsing high mass star), or slam particles together with enough combined energy to create a black hole. (Interesting note: High energy density can also create black holes.) Anyway, a separate thread might be a good idea. Bah. That's just what they want us to think.

Hrm... if Leon pulls off his coup and instates martial law, then Alto dressing up as a woman may be the only way he has to move around and fight the good fight. I think this acting ability of his is too central to not be relevant to the plot.

I don't think needs to . Depending on the reveal, we can probably draw our own conclusions, but there's no need to revisit .

Settle down, you two. Lots of interesting information here. It answers some questions we've all been speculating over (or does it?), but mostly in the category of, "WTF happened in the past?" In terms of future events, I only see one real spoiler.

Wait wait wait. Crazy theory time! What if Grace, et al... ARE the Vajra?!?

I think that's debatable. While Elmo may not be a marketing genius, he really believes in Ranka and did everything he could to promote her. It just happened that someone kept sabotaging all his efforts to try and promote her through more traditional means, like the Macross universe's equivalent of the Internet. In the end, what gave her her big break is when she was passing out those promotional items on the street, and the director of the Bird-Human movie picked it up. (It's quick and hard to catch, but it's definitely the same guy, and we're told later that's why he was interested in having her as an extra in the film in the first place, I believe.) So you could definitely trace Ranka's big break to Elmo's persistence. Good luck isn't just a matter of chance, but being ready to exploit those fleeting opportunities that present themselves. (And I fully expect Elmo to finally get a chance to show his stuff before the series ends.) If you try and look it from the perspective of maximizing short term profits, then yes, logically you'd want to move through talent as quickly as possible. Take one big sensation, grab it, then move on to the next as quickly as possible. That's just a strategy for maximizing the manager's gains, though. If we assume the manager is working for her clients, she certainly isn't providing them good value by dumping them as soon as she can. If we ignore it entirely, she's still not showing much skill if she can't successfully manage the career of her client over the entire life cycle. A great manager should be able to take a star at the beginning, peak, and end of their career, and make the most of it. A great manager shouldn't be working to further herself, but get the most out of her star. If she's not, then almost by definition, she's not doing her job as a manager. Of course, Grace has absolutely no interest in the success of the people she manages, so of course she doesn't have their best interest at heart. They're all just pawns in her game, and she could care less about their welfare. Still, you can see some of Grace's skill in scenes like where she takes Ranka out for a photo opportunity in the ruins of one of the damaged Islands. That's classic promotion right there. But considering she doesn't really care if Ranka succeeds in the long run, I'd have to say she's still a terrible manager. EDIT: Oh, by the way. Anyone else making a distinction between the SDF:M Kaifun and the DYRL Kaifun? He was pretty awful in SDF:M, but I thought he wasn't too bad in DYRL. Still kinda a jerk, but a tolerable one.

There have been hints dropped here and there for a while that there's a Vajra colony on the Frontier. Whether they call in reinforcements, or just unleash the ones already there, remains to be seen. (My personal bet is on the latter; if they call in reinforcements, they'd be detected. If they unleash an attack from the inside, it'll take everyone by surprise. Sorta like that one episode of SDF:M, where the Zentradi invade through the Daedalus--one of my favorite episodes, incidentally. More Vajra might fold in later on.)