Ooh, this looks good!

[lilfluff]

The scene, a single high school girl sits in a classroom, becoming ever more lost as a formula for Hohmann transfer orbits fills the white board. When she complains that some of the numbers are seven digits the instructor points out she has been given a calculator. As she looks at the calculator she's stunned by the number of buttons on it, only to be even more shocked by a realization...

"There's no equals key!"
"Of course not! Don't you know reverse Polish calculation?"
"Of course not!"
"Oh, really?" An all to excited look appears on the instructor's face. "In that case I'll take five minutes to cram its operation into your head. When I'm done with you, you'll never be able to use a regular calculator again. Prepare yourself."


Our vict-- er, high school girl has traveled to the Solomon Islands to search for her father who disappeared years before on her parents honeymoon trip. Meanwhile a Japanese company wants to build a new manned rocket to operate from the islands -- their only problem, their current astronaut (on loan from the JSDF) is about forty kilo's too heavy for their only reliable model's payload capacity -- while our main character is actually a couple kilo's less than that target weight. So a deal is struck. The Solomon Islands Space Agency will use its contacts to help search for the missing father, and she will be their astronaut so they can get a successful launch before the end of the year and keep their funding.

I think I'll be keeping my eyes out for this one on DVD. So what if it's still airing in Japan, somebody go and license it already.

EDIT: D'oh! jeriendhal points out I never mentioned the title. The anime in question is called Rocket Girls. If there were still a good nearby independent store that carried anime I'd tell them this is on my guaranteed buy list. (Stuck with the chains as the nearby stores, no point telling the staff there, more than likely will be gone in a few weeks let alone by the time this is licensed and released)

Comments

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

I thnk I want to watch this, but you'd better let me know what the hell is IS!

[lilfluff.livejournal.com]

Rocket Girls. The bits I've spotted online look good. They apparently don't draw out the search for her father either, realizing that could get old. Instead when she runs into him the encounter is used to propel things even further along.

The other good new show would look to be Nanoha: StrikerS, which can be described as magic girls grow up and continue to fight the good fight as adults (and worry about two new members of their team even though those two kids look to be a few years older than they were in the original Nanoha).

Haven't been having this much fun since discovering the BBS that was run locally by some people in the 80's and 90's that had translated scripts for various anime. That was my first introduction to the Dirty Pair (who are presumably kept employed by the Good Guys only for fear of how much more damage they would cause if they ever worked for the Bad Guys) and Ghost in the Shell.