Macross Δ (Delta) - Mission 18 - READ 1st POST

[Chronocidal]

While I love Plus to death, it does have a lot of inferred development by way of flashbacks. It's a pretty quick and easy one-shot story with not a lot of room for massive development though. I do think the development in the movie showed a little better than the OVA though.

I really don't know where things are going to go with Delta, and I can hope and dream all I like about minor things, but the feeling I cannot shake is that the bombing of Windermere saved the planet. Whether by way of stopping a NUNS group that was about to dig up a Protoculture doomsday device, or by stopping the Windermereans from doing the same.

What gets more and more confusing is the way the pseudo-science, song energy, fold wave generation stuff keeps working like an out of control McGuffin. We get it, the Protoculture liked their music. But more seriously, I really appreciated that (despite the naked out-of-body weirdness) they gave a very sensible reason for what singing was doing with the Vajra in Frontier. Now though, it looks like they've stepped beyond "practical" use for the songs, and are tapping into something more similar to Galaxy's plot to link humanity into a hive mind.

I guess here's what gets me... the wacky trance state Hayate is getting pulled into looks close enough to Alto's experiences to be relatively the same thing. The only reason Sheryl and Ranka could do that was because they were both carrying around Vajra bacteria, and Alto was wearing Sheryl's earring. In fact, the "riding the wind" stuff going on looks an awful lot like Alto in the YF-29.

Up until now, this has all seemed to depend on proximity to fold quartz, which seems to, for lack of a more scientific explanation, turn focused emotions into EM emissions that exist in the same frequency domain as the energy associated with fold drives.

The big question then... Why does Windermere seem to have the ability to mess with the minds of people who are nowhere near any sort of fold quartz? Or, barring that, is that entire cluster of planets so chock full of Protoculture technology (and possible massive amounts of fold quartz) that the entire cluster acts like a giant fold wave amplifier?

[kajnrig]

Because Bogue gets picked on for being overly emotional and his stock die Walkure shot. So people have pointed out that it's actually a good tactic since if he succeeded in killing the girls Windemer gets auto wins from there in out, and that grew to him being the unsung hero of the aerial knights because people have a dance of humor. Now I must hide be for I'm hunted down for spilling top secrets.

Lol

I'll admit I'm more interested in him as a sort of romantic comedy protagonist. His infatuation with Walkure, and especially his reaction to them last(?) episode, resembles a 12-year old's first foray into puberty, when the last vestiges of "Ew, cooties!" clash with "Why does looking at this make my willie hard?" Could also be that he's gay, but whatever it is, he's clearly primed to go on a romantic adventure.

I'm also curious about Windermeran life stages. It seems like they're more or less the exact same as humans, and with the same timing, no less, but then their late 20s come around and they burn through the final stages of life within a year or five. It's rather odd, to be honest. With such short lifespans, you wonder how they've managed to develop societally in a way that even remotely resembles mankind's cultures. I wonder if Bogue has a wife, and if he does, what his home life with her is like.

...or maybe Windermere IV's orbit is just super long, and a year for them lasts some 900 days.

[kalvasflam]

Because Bogue gets picked on for being overly emotional and his stock die Walkure shot. So people have pointed out that it's actually a good tactic since if he succeeded in killing the girls Windemer gets auto wins from there in out, and that grew to him being the unsung hero of the aerial knights because people have a dance of humor. Now I must hide be for I'm hunted down for spilling top secrets.

As Reina would say: "Now you must die."

heh heh, but that's exactly the tongue and cheek reason why Bogue is casted as the unsung hero.... because of all the idiots in Delta, he appears to be one of the few with an ounce of tactical sense. The other way to look at Bogue is that his behavior indicates that he has never been with a woman before, and hence his constant over reaction to the Walkure, you can almost peg him as some kind of fanatic who believes a woman's place is in the home, preferably the kitchen, and he doesn't know what to make of a woman outside of that. This is also of course tongue and cheek, since his reaction is likely focused just on the Walkure.

Edited August 5, 2016 by kalvasflam

[trojan_gambit]

I'm still waiting for (at least) a single AK going KIA.

Between AK vs Delta the score is 1 - 0.1

(Delta gets 0.1 for poking Keith's eye)

If we consider how the AK wreck wave after wave of NUNS fleet, the kill ratio is even more embarassing for the Delta squad.

C'mon SK-san, make Delta do something we can be proud of.

Edited August 6, 2016 by trojan_gambit

[Product9]

Delta has too much stuff going on to be good. It lacks a solid focus. Is it a coming of age series about a love triangle? A series about a band? A series about rival knights of the skies? You can say it is all of them but it is impossible to do all of them justice in a twenty or so minute long episodes. TV shows traditional have a main A story and minor B story in each episode. In a single of episode of Delta they try to include several A stories in the same amount of time. Result is all of them look like the B story. Delta needed to focus on less characters or expanded each episode's running time.

I don't think the whole a-plot, b-plot structure applies to this kind of series, though. It's more for episodic shows where each episode is a self-contained story. This kind of overarching narrative typically found in anime is a little different, but I understand where you're coming from. All in all, I don't think there is necessarily too much going on in Delta, but rather the production staff might not have the skills to pull it off. They can cram a ton of information into a visual story like this one, but they have to be a master of pacing, as well as using the visual medium to its fullest. I also think that if there is recycled animation in a show (and Delta has a lot), then odds are those scenes are superfluous because they aren't bringing anything new to the table.

Then again, maybe the last episode will tie everything together flawlessly and blow our minds!

... yeah right. It'll be a rushed ending that will be totally different in the movie retellings that follow.

Sorry for going off topic, but this is something that has been on my mind for a while:

I would love to see some less atmospheric, more space only real mech designs from SK.

Well, there is the GP-01Fb from Gundam 0083. Shoji Kawamori designed that one, and it's a pretty boss mobile suit design in my opinion.

I personally think the mobile suit is probably the best all around 'space fighter' I've seen in science fiction. I could explain my reasoning, but that would go way off topic.

I tend to think every Macross series since the original feels like ideas from something else being tailored into Macross.

If you rewatch the first episode and make a comparison to where thing have gotten now you'll see a drastic change in overall direction. Not to mention several interesting elements are dropped overtime.

The very cool/fun idea of dancing battroid action scenes are all gone in favor of generic dog fights since episode 6. I would totally get a kick outta seeing Hayate confuse the crap outta all the windermere pilots and beating his opponents with break dancing moves. BUT NOPE. No more of that.

Chuck being shown as a cocky pilot in calling himself "Chuck-sama to the rescue" the first episode with his "submarine attack" is also nonexistent ever since.

The seemingly powerful Aerial Knights are also swept to the wayside without any further development in character or special fighting skills for most of them.

It makes we wonder if Shoji took off from Delta half way through and became more devoted to his "next project" already.

I find myself rewatching Plus because of it's great action sequences and Sharon apple concerts but tend to skip over all the "plot stuff". Plus was not all that great in it's writing as well. It had good characters but none of them had a real arc in terms of change or development.

I agree. I really thought Hayate was going to be some kind of break dancing pilot who would baffle his enemies with his moves, and take the overall 'no killing' approach. Instead, he went from being this really colorful, independent character to being little more than just another Valkyrie pilot with little to distinguish himself from the rest. In my opinion Alto did it better.

But I still like Hayate. He's got a cool personality.

I also think that this show might be too much of a Macross story, and not enough of a story on its own merits. It builds upon a rich universe, but as a result doesn't bring as many new ideas on its own. That's just a feeling I get, though.

As for Plus, I think it was a really good story about friendship. It had strong themes and believable execution, which gave it weight and power. At least it did for me... this is all subjective of course.

Sorry 19 I forgot to spell out the acronymn's, I usually do that.

I think you're talking to me? Don't worry about it, I can research. Acronym Finder really helps with that.

If anything, being given only part of the puzzle encourages me to read more and expand my horizons, so it's all good. At least for me.

That being said, the trend since Zero is that SK is limiting the tactical uses for battroid and GERWALK combat in atmospheric engagements (as I feel he should). These limits are logical. In space all bets are off and the Valks can utilize all their transformation capabilities without any noticable disadvantage.

Aside from having more power for the engines, I don't really understand how fighter is useful in space. Or GERWALK for that matter.

I really don't see the logic of limiting the other modes in atmosphere. In Zero, maybe, because they were older designs using modern jet engines, but even in Zero there was a lot of multi-mode air-to-air combat. Frontier didn't have as much because they spent so little time in an atmosphere, but when they did, the also utilized all modes. Fighter mode is good for speed and range, but that's about it. Fixed wing aircraft are extremely limited in what they can do. In a dogfight situation, something like a Queadluun-Rhea is going to wipe the floor with a non-transformable fighter. Dogfighting is all about optimizing turn rate in order to point weapons. A vehicle with arms isn't as limited as one without.

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 Confuses Gamlin]

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.

[Roy Focker]

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.

[Nazareno2012]

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.

In fairness the VF-31 and SV-262 both have different variants with different onboard equipment. It's not just the paint jobs that are different.

[This Confuses Gamlin]

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.

[d3v]

Anyone know the title of the song Mikumo and Freyja were singing this episode (which also served as the ending theme for the past couple of episodes)?

EDIT: Never mind. Figured it out through Google fu.

Edited August 6, 2016 by d3v

[Product9]

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...

There is no argument here - the F/A-18 is clearly superior to a MiG-31 in a dogfight. So superior there is no question.

To be clear, a dogfight is a close range, relatively low speed engagement involving guns and short range air-to-air missiles. Of course, missiles sort of determine everything these days, and HOBS (High Off-Boresight) missiles can negate maneuverability to a large degree, so I'm assuming guns only for this example (and I should have made this clear earlier). Also, Valkyries can intercept missiles with their own missiles and guns, so that's sort of a moot point here as well, so I'm assuming guns only for the Valkyries too.

Yes, the MiG-31 is a long range interceptor and has that major advantage, but my point was to illustrate that in a dogfight, turn rate is what matters, not top speed (and a battroid can out turn a fighter, or rather rotate inside the fighter's turn radius in a dogfight situation). Since missiles don't count for much in Macross these days, there isn't really any place for long range interceptors in that universe. It's all about WVR (Within Visual Range) combat almost entirely at subsonic speeds, but I digress.

The example of Bogue zipping past the VF-31As doesn't really apply here, because he wasn't fighting the VF-31As... he was flying past them at high speed. They weren't fighting him either, rather taking a few potshots at him as he flew by. Of course it's a moot point because in a series like this an important character isn't likely going to be beaten by some no name, no face pilot. Besides, if they wanted to chase him, the VF-31As could have transformed and chased him....... again, my point is that there is a mode for every situation, and the strength of a Valkyrie is that it can transform to adapt to changes in circumstances. If anything the example supports my position because it illustrates that sticking to one mode is disadvantageous. I never said or even insinuated that a battroid is superior at chasing something down... that's why we have fighter. However, a battroid or GERWALK would be better at protecting Walkure because it can actually stick with them rather than flying around them in a wide orbit and being out of position 3/4s of the time. Ozma protecting Sheryl in Itsuwari no Utahime comes to mind.

The engagement isn't necessarily dictated by who's faster, but rather by the objectives of each side. If the objective is to shoot down the White Knight, then speed is important because he's going to be running away for most of the fight until he's in an advantageous position to counterattack (like in episode 13). If the objective is to protect Walkure, then the airspace in the immediate vicinity around Walkure becomes most important. This airspace moves with Walkure, and if they are stationary, then speed isn't as important. Unless no one is protecting them and Bogue is free to just rush in and shoot them in the face because their defenses utterly suck. A couple battroids standing with them or GERWALKs hovering nearby (with important enough characters inside to be skillful) would be effective at deterring him. His tactics might have even gotten him blown up by now.

In a 1v1 the engagement is dictated by whoever is being attacked. If they run, then it's going to be a high speed fight as the attacker is chasing the defender down. If the defender chooses to stand his ground, then the attacker is going to be forced into a slow speed fight because that's where his objective is. Everything is determined by the objectives.

I suppose in a fight where two dudes just wanna kill each other it really depends on who does what first. Keith vs Messer for example. Both pilots chose to stick to fighter, so it was a fighter on fighter duel. If one had transformed (like Hayate vs Keith in episode 13), then it would have shifted the paradigm. But someone has to make the move first. I still think the whole fighter vs fighter thing in Delta is mostly an honor duel situation, not one of practicality. Keith only transformed because he couldn't shake Hayate, and he might have pulled an advantage from that if Hayate didn't transform right along with him.

You know, Arad really should just stick close to Walkure and protect them. It would give him something to do. Ozma had it right.

Edited August 6, 2016 by Product9

[This Confuses Gamlin]

I accidentally deleted my first reply while still writing it. Why I should always use an external editor instead of the browser window when writing something long.

Obligatory Episode 18 content is actually relevant to this discussion: The episode featured the second time that Hayate has zipped in and prevented Bogue from shooting his load Walküre from close range. Then he does it again against Keith.

Walküre really should have more protection, though. My thought when the first episode aired was that Walküre and Delta would be integrated like the Jamming Birds, but instead the series has chosen to often put them closer to the action than anyone else other than Fire Bomber while simultaneously being essentially naked to the beams and bombs out there.

Protecting Walküre does invoke the speed discussion again. A practical comparison for keeping them safe would be a US Navy carrier battle group.

Fifth-generation Valkyries are listed as capable of Mach 5+ at 10000 meters, subject to airframe heating limits. That's 1700 meters per second. They'd be slower at low altitudes, but the Kh-41 (SS-N-22 Sunburn) was capable of Mach 2.2 at sea level, which meant that the CVBG would have under 30 seconds to react once it crossed the horizon, and realistically it would be game over at that point if the cruise missile was carrying a 120 kiloton nuclear warhead. Ozma and Brera could handle all the incoming at the end of Itsuwari no Utahime, and Delta shot down all of the incoming during Episode 4, but they're heroes (and in Episode 4 it took all of Delta to deal with a threat coming from a single direction). Destroids would be vapor, and none of them, heroes or not, would be able to stop a reaction bomb or dimension weapon if it airburst overhead with its blast radius in the multi-kilometer range. Assuming that their opponents weren't silly enough to dramatically fly one plane overhead and drop one bomb, but instead tossed it in there while the battle was in full swing.

Thus why the Navy put so much effort into the F-14 and AIM-54 and defending from as far out as possible instead of sitting in place and betting on AAA.

You've got a point about multimode providing situational advantages, but they're necessarily transitory. Switching to GERWALK should provide plenty of out-of-plane thrust capability in most cases; Battroid would take up that much more time (even if the conversion is only a couple of seconds longer) and will still kill a lot of airspeed just by turning the VF's profile from a dart to a blob. (As another practical consideration, there should be a helluva lot of turbulence from trying to horse a limb out against the existing airflow.) Perhaps it doesn't take very long to get up to speed again, but it's still time and energy wasted, and assumes that the Battroid will actually hit the fighter as it goes by; again, at speed, a couple of seconds translates to hundreds of meters, which can be enough to regain the initiative. There's also the wingman factor, which doesn't come up often in these hero duels, but should be a practical consideration. (The VF-31As that stop to engage Bogue in Episode 6 do get hit from behind when they target fixate.)

Full Battroid should be less necessary now that more VFs feature flexible weapon mountings (on weapons packs or in the way the VF-31 can pop its arms out).

The Mecha Manual entry on the Queadluun-Rhea mentions that the battle suit is still inferior in maneuverability to the VF-25. That doesn't go into detail about whether that's comparing Battroid mode itself or including all modes, but it's worth mentioning that in Frontier Episode 4, Alto hardly ever transforms the -25 from fighter mode during his practice match with Klan except for kabuki posing and finally only after he lands on the Zentradi derelict. Some Worf Effect is probably in play for Klan here, but they're also in vacuum, which should give the Queadluun plenty of advantages if it just came down to instantaneous turn rate and being able to point guns.

Edited August 6, 2016 by This Confuses Gamlin

[Product9]

snip

You make some compelling points, but I still stand by what I've said. Mostly because of what we've seen in previous Macross shows, especially the Frontier movies which are our closest comparison in terms of real world time, and the machines involved (the current ISC equipped generation of VFs). The VF-27 vs YF-29 battle has pretty much all the examples I need. Also, the transformation from fighter to battroid (and battroid to fighter) on these modern Valks is frighteningly fast, probably around a half second. I wouldn't wanna get in the way of that mechanism.

When it comes to strategic weapons like dimension bombs, I don't have much that I can say. That kind of thing goes out of the scope of fighter on fighter combat, but it is certainly a consideration. Though, considering how they have defended against massive focused beam attacks with barriers or swarms of Vajra, I wonder what kind of defense options they have against WMDs. Omni-directional barrier maybe? Is that still a thing?

As for Alto vs Klan in space... I can't speak to that because Macross Frontier didn't treat space like space at all. It was just a bigger, darker atmosphere to that show, with shock waves and contrails and everything (though highly stylized, it's kind of hard to miss - please correct me if I've missed something about the tech that explains these phenomenons).

The very idea that they were turning in space invalidates a great many things. It's not possible (or at least not practical) to turn in space... there's no medium to push off of and it takes an equal amount of thrust to cancel a directional movement as it does to create one (verniers being a lot weaker than main engines means they can't cancel movement in that vector as quickly, so pointing the nose is easy enough, but won't as easily change direction of travel like in an atmosphere because there's no medium for the wings and body to interact with). Rotating and translating is what spaceships do... and that was actually pretty well reflected in that opening battle of DYRL all those years ago, so there is precedent. I need to go back and evaluate the space battles we've had in Delta up until now before I can comment on this series's treatment of space, but I think it's better than what we got in Frontier.

Also, the only atmospheric example in Frontier with Queadluuns I could think of is that short bout between Alto and carrot guy in episode 12.

But, yes, to try and move back toward the topic, this episode is yet another example why Walkure needs full-time protection. Hayate should have been stationed with Walkure to provide point defense, maybe with a couple destroids as backup dancers. They could put on a great show while doing it. I wonder if Hayate can protect against the Var with his sweet moves. It's been shown before in Macross that not only singing has power, what with Veffidas' drumming and all.

Then again, Mikumo did just sort of start singing right in the middle of everything without the rest of the crew being ready for it. That wasn't a very tactically sound decision, but everyone just went along with it. In their defense, maybe they would have had more defense if they weren't on a covert mission. At least when singing on Aether they have that shield pyramid which can take an impressive beating. And, also in their defense, they actually remembered the multidrones this time. I wonder if we'll ever get to see them recharge again.

Edited August 6, 2016 by Product9

[This Confuses Gamlin]

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.)

[Product9]

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.

Oh, right the Sigur Valens and the reaction bomb. Durr. How did I forget about that... it just happened a few episodes ago.

I think it's time to refresh myself on Delta and watch episode one to wherever we are when I get there in preparation for the last few eps. Thanks for the discussion... see you guys in the Mission 19 thread.

[kalvasflam]

Then again, Mikumo did just sort of start singing right in the middle of everything without the rest of the crew being ready for it. That wasn't a very tactically sound decision, but everyone just went along with it. In their defense, maybe they would have had more defense if they weren't on a covert mission. At least when singing on Aether they have that shield pyramid which can take an impressive beating. And, also in their defense, they actually remembered the multidrones this time. I wonder if we'll ever get to see them recharge again.

Remember, Mikumo can sing where and when she damn well pleases... what... is Bogue really going to shot her?

Let's face it, he is the only one who consistently makes the "effort." The rest of the AKs are too stupid for the most part.

For all of his "so called" efforts, Bogue is nothing really more than a fanboy, all these chances he has had to eliminate the Walkure, he has blown them all... every single one. He may have the right idea in his brain, but his other organ is overriding his brain. For example, the completely inappropriate changing from fighter to battroid mode in this episode right as he blows away Reina's shield, just keep firing with everything and he could've turned Reina into a kawaii little hamburger, but instead, he transforms and makes a show of aiming his big fat gun, just long enough for Hayate to blow it out of his hands.

The truth of the matter is, while Bogue on the surface is pretending to be strategically forward thinking and making a big show that he is an AK, he is in fact nothing but a fanboy, and subconsciously, Walkure owns Bogue. They are playing the poor sap like a puppet. Just wait until he starts offing members of the AK.

[This Confuses Gamlin]

he is in fact nothing but a fanboy

Those guys need to get out more.

[David Hingtgen]

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 posted a longer version of this in the DX -31 thread a few days ago, but I think it will. I know *I* have less interest in the -31 toys due to limited use of battroid and sparse use of super packs. Frontier enticed us early on with awesome battles highlighting mode-switching and the plot-based equipping of super and armor packs, and later tornado. Delta has given us just one forgettable use of the sound booster.

[Ignacio Ocamica]

I posted a longer version of this in the DX -31 thread a few days ago, but I think it will. I know *I* have less interest in the -31 toys due to limited use of battroid and sparse use of super packs. Frontier enticed us early on with awesome battles highlighting mode-switching and the plot-based equipping of super and armor packs, and later tornado. Delta has given us just one forgettable use of the sound booster.

Hate to say it but I agree 100%.

[Mazinger]

So, I'm not sure if I had seen it posted definitely anywhere, but do we know whether it's 26-ish episodes only?

With so many plot points up in the air I have a hard time believing that they will all get tied up by the end of 26 (or 27.)

Am I really hoping against hope that we'll get more episodes along the lines of SDF or M7?

Any chance of there being a "second" season?

[squaresphere]

So, I'm not sure if I had seen it posted definitely anywhere, but do we know whether it's 26-ish episodes only?

With so many plot points up in the air I have a hard time believing that they will all get tied up by the end of 26 (or 27.)

Am I really hoping against hope that we'll get more episodes along the lines of SDF or M7?

Any chance of there being a "second" season?

Yeah it'll be a 26, unlikely to get a second season. If it's popular it might get a movie version like Frontier.