1 Interesting. The $3 version I downloaded is the same file size for 854*480 XviD. For the size, I'm not too impressed with the quality - there are significant compression artifacts, especially in dark scenes.
Based on what I've seen elsewhere, I'd expect video of this size and quality to be around 200MB. (He said, with no specific expertise in video compression).

2 What I did was to take a frame grab using PowerDVD, which is set to store images at raw size. That's really the only way I know what the raw size is, and it's possible I'm wrong because PowerDVD is interpreting the size incorrectly.

3 Tim, did you get yours from BOST?

4 No, mine was also from Crunchyroll. The resolution numbers I'm seeing come from Quicktime (via Perian) and VLC.

5 A little-bitty girl like Charlotte, carrying a BFG like the Ma Deuce?  Someone would have thought she was compensating -- and she clearly had nothing to compensate for, as her bikini showed.

6 OK, I can believe that PowerDVD has got it wrong.

7 BOST version is (according to mplayer) 720x480

8 I just can't see how small caliber rounds are doing anything against those hulls, unless there's some AT Field mumbo-jumbo going on.

Frankly, the girl with the rocket launcher appears to have the best idea.

And yeah, Charlotte should be carrying Ma, if they're serious about it.  But then, the other girls should really be carrying 20mm cannon, since those, and not the 7-8mm MGs, were their primary weapons in the war.

But then, they'd have to wear some sort of exoskeleton to carry guns that big...

9

The answer to all these questions is to wave your hands and say, "It's magic!"

The weapon that Miyafuji uses in the second episode is a 13 mm machine gun. That should have a kick like a horse, especially for a girl that tiny.

10 OVA makes it a separate point how girls are magically augmented to handle weapons which two burly men can barely lift. So that's immaterial, Charlotte could've carried M2 if only creators had three neurons still firing. It's the same thing with Sanya who didn't even get any Russian weapons at all.

As for the 20mm, Barkhorn has an MG 151 (and 151/20 later apparently), in line with Bf-109F evolution.

11 The Japanese -love- that MG42. ;p

It's also quite visually distinctive. So's the BAR, really. However, what about the Ma Deuce? I don't really know what one -looks- like, I hate to say. Too many .50 installations to have a standard aesthetic for what a Ma Deuce looks like? Who knows.

12

They aren't staying completely pure in terms of how they assign weapons. The web site says that Miyafuji's second weapon is a Broomhandle Mauser, not exactly a classic Japanese weapon.

Probably the reason is that Japanese pistols of the WWII era were notoriously shitty. I read about some of them in a book one time and they were horrible.

13 When I think of the M2, especially in a fantastic context, I tend to envision the man-portable version that Roadblock used to carry around on GIJoe. . .

14 I heard that many Japanese officers carried C-96 and it was extremely popular in China as well. You can see it in historic piece manga quite often.

Funnily enough, many Russian senior officers had their own C-96s instead of TT even during WWII. I saw those pieces in the preserved in the Soviet Army Museum. Many were hold-overs from the Civil War times. I suppose it helped that if you were not concerned with the risk of getting the bolt in your eye due to the shearing of a disconnector, you could load the standard Russian 7.62 round into 7.63 Mauser.

15 One of the "Oh hell yeah!" moments in ep. 2 for me was when Mio had to drop her weapon because the barrel had overheated past red-hot. That's a real problem with a quick-firing air-cooled weapon, and, like unlimited ammo (which she did have), one you never see portrayed anywhere.

Of course the real reason was so Miyafuji would pick up a gun to bring to her -- then get told to use it. Much more in-character than going from "I'll heal everyone" to "I'm Rambo."

Interesting to see the difference between her healing talent and her defensive ability, wasn't it? She can't heal a guy as well as someone with a roll of bandages, but based on the size of her "takeoff field" she might have been able to deploy a shield big enough to protect the Akagi. And I bet that's how she's going to slot into the group; as their defensive specialist.

16 I don't think there is any role for a defensive specialists, in normal situations. Their tactics tend to be swarms. There could be situations, though, where they'd want one guy in front stopping fire while several others prepared something big behind her, and Miyafuji would be the obvious choice for the front guy in that case.

I also noted the size of the takeoff field when Miyafuji went up, and I wondered about that. If you go back to when Sakamoto takes off, hers was just as large, or close to it.

It seems that the defensive shield is something all witches can use spontaneously. (Otherwise there's no way that Miyafuji could do it.) The size of it does portend future greatness, and what I suspect is that eventually someone's going to come up with a way of using ki for attack instead of defense.

Sakamoto already does that to some extent; she energizes her katana with her ki, which is why it can do what it does. (That's right out of the mythos; nothing unusual about it. Ref Trunks and his sword in the Androids saga of DBZ.)

What we're definitely seeing is somethng like Sakura in Sakura Wars, whose ki was potentially larger than any of the other members of the team and who eventually used a spectacular attack (the "cherry blossom attack") to finish off the big-bad and win the war. I'm also getting deja-vu to the way that the Magic Users Club OVA ended.

Presumably Miyafuji will eventually do something really spectacular that is beyond the abilities of anyone else.

...By the way, I don't consider anything that happens in the first two episodes of a 26-ep series to be a spoiler, so we don't have to worry about spoiler tags yet.

17 Clever, Steven. ANN lists only 13, but since it's GONZO, it's likely to be a 2-parter (see: Vandread, Druaga). But personally, I expect unlimited continuations a-la Gundam, because the whole thing is built on toys.

18

You're right. I remembered it being scheduled to be a 26-ep series, and I was wrong. As to whether it'll be like Vandread, that's anyone's guess.

Still, anything in the first couple of episodes even for a half-season isn't really a spoiler.

19

I want to see one of the girls carrying a GAU-8 Avenger.

Just because.

20 I want to see a B-29 girl.

More to the point, I want to see Japanese viewer reactions to a B-29 girl.

21 The B-29-kun (officially featured in Kamichu!) should disabuse anyone of any illusions pretty quckly. Japanese viewers will love a female version even more. Chizumatic mentioned it before, BTW.

22

All of these mecha-musume are fighters. None of them are even light bombers, let alone two-engine bombers (ahem).

But yeah, the spirit of a B-29 makes an appearance over Onomichi in ep 9 of Kamichu. Let's see if I can link to the grab of it I already posted:

23

OK, it stripped out my "img" tag. Let's try it with BBCode:

24 Just in passing, during the war the Japanese referred to the B-29's as "bii-san". They didn't really need anymore distinction than that, because until very late in the war the B-29's were the only American planes they ever saw. Except for the Doolittle Raid, which was a freak, it wasn't until Halsey's carrier raids in June of 1945 before anything else American could reach Japanese skies.