Arpeggio of Blue Steel (Aoki Hagane no Arpeggio)
 

Surprised to not see a topic on this series since I've been following it about a month now and it's been really good.

Description from Mangaupdates:
Suddenly, a fleet of ships with mysterious superweapons called the “Fleet of Fog” appeared all around the world. Humanity didn’t have the technology to fight such a fleet, so they were driven out of the sea...

Seventeen years after the battle, for some reason, Gunzou Chihaya and his crewmates aboard the I-401 and the personification (Mental Model) of the I-401, Iona, started fighting the Fleet of Fog...

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Really enjoying this even though not a big fan of the setting...

Interesting manga that has gone under the radar so to speak. I'm going to marathon it this week. :D

Was waiting for a thread on this to pop up!

I love it. It's like Gundam but with battleships. Actually, now that the Fog is inching closer to interacting with human beings, this is becoming more like Macross with battleships. I also find the idea that a young naval commander is going to get himself a harem of autonomous battleship AIs hilarious.

Interestingly, the author did two Gundam manga adaptations before this, Mobile Suit Gundam: The Gihren Assassination Plot and Mobile Suit Gundam MSV-R: Return of Johnny Ridden.

Takao holds a special place in my heart (and many other readers in TW) since I was born in the city with the same name. :) She also clearly the favorite of the author as she gets new out fits the most.

Pretty interesting, but the scanlators are caught up so now it will be a wait going forward since it is a monthly series. For a harem lead Gunzou's a good protagonist and I look forward to the day he has his complete Blue Fleet.

I would like to work on those fleets' engines, if you get what I mean. :naughty:

I think Gunzou is probably one of the less interesting characters in the manga. Compared to a lot of manga, Gunzou doesn't really take up that much screen time (or page time in this case).

Gunzou gets less screentime because recently they’ve been focusing more on the fleet chicks fanservice. The previous fight with the fog fleet and Zondark were was a more decent development on the actual storyline. After the battle with Zondark, the series atmosphere suddenly taken an odd turn with the moe and other otaku stuff. Imo all the characters, political, and mechanical background being presented in vol 1 and vol 2 were kinda wasted because they’re now focusing on fanservice and the girls oogling over Gunzou. This is like Ark Performance’s being forced to keep up with development of cute girls fanservice + mech formula for the geek world.

If you see Ark Performance’s fantastic and genious previous works on Gihren Zabi’s Gundam and the more recent Gundam’s Red Wayline (you can look for them, they’re scanlated), their portrayal of the actual storyline are more political, intriguing, interesting characters, sophisticated mechs with zero fanservice.

Still I enjoyed the story on Aoki, seriously I’m more interested how the USFJ and the glasses guy plan to overthrow the current Japanese’ regime, and how they’re planning to ship the warhead to San Diego.

As a character there's not much information about him yet, but he's smart, has some backbone, is an effective leader, and actually has worthwhile skills that provide a legitimate reason for his harem to be interested in him. He might not be the most colorful and unique character in the manga at this point, but considering many harem lead are fairly spineless, whiny or inept he's competent which will make it a lot easier to believe/understand when he does eventually get his harem.

The series is still setting the stage for the main plot so the crew will probably grow and change as the story goes on and I think he, as a leader and individual, has a good starting point and a lot of potential growth.

^ I think it’s sad that this series is now somewhat being categorized as a harem. Vol 1 and 2 gave us that the purpose of the story was to defeat the fleet of fog which literally annihilates the entire navy and logistic in the global sea transport, hardly no harem crap involved. Considering it’s Ark Performance I believed they’ll try to squeeze the harem and fanservice part to an absolute minimum like they did with the first 2 volumes, and focusing more on the political background, mech specifics and the characters... seems like I was mistaken. Oh well still a good series but imo it will be better if there’s no fanservice around.

Well as he said in the author's note of volume one, the entire series was conceived based on the idea of a new torpedo, but then he decided it would be too boring so beautiful girls should be added. Those are the two main components the author started with new torpedo and beautiful girls, so it's perhaps the aim was to write a story about love in a wartime situation or something to that effect. If Ark Performance decides to completely eliminate the fan service and harem elements I'd probably still read it, but at the moment they are present and are part of the storyline.

Gunzou already has 3 girls in love with him, both his current and former sonar officers as well as Takao so by some standards he already has a harem. Given the fact that Gunzou will be creating his own fleet and most of the ships introduced are controlled by a attractive female AI it seems logical that Gunzou will be increasing the size of his harem from the ranks of these ships. This is not to say that the harem elements are the only aspect of the story, simply that they are there. If readers find that those elements add to their enjoyment of the work as a whole then it shows that Ark Performance was right to include them.

^ Agree with the notion. The harem elements and fanservice elements are there as the spice for the actual storyline, however Ark Performance manages to keep them at minimum on vol 1 and 2. They focused more on naval tactics warfare, the navy commandos upbringing behind the scenes to overthrow the army, and the travel towards San Diego. I think its started around when the crew docked at Iwao Jima, when the arts suddenly showed comedy and lots and lots of fanservice, like the dressing of the Mental AI by the kid. I just think its odd when previously they showed none of those at all. Thats when I noticed that Ark Performance seems to do this in order to attract more audience from the moe driven geek/otaku world. Unfortunately for me they keep doing this more than 3 consecutive chapters until now, especially when I see the somehwhat maid robots are being prepared by Lawrence in order repel the army spec ops being sent by the Central government to retrieve the Mental AI. I really hope that won’t be the case in the next chapter. Suspension of belief is one thing, but I was hoping if they do manage to repel them, it would be spec ops vs spec ops.

Not that I mind the fanservice, but seeing its Ark Performance I prefer to see more politics and more old men and adults driving the storylines. They should cover the storyline about 80% or so while the remaining would be the harem and fanservice. But hey it’s just me.

Anyway my favorite character is Zondark. He manages to beat a Fog ship using only normal fleets. I think Zondark is going to be Gunzou’s rival as the story progresses.

Wasn't Zondark talking to 2501 in chapter 18, I think he has a Fog u boat, it just doesn't have a mental AI.

The technology that the Fog ships possess makes old technology virtually useless so I don't hold it against him, but all the major players are going to need Fog ships at least until the new model torpedoes are in production. Zondark clearly understood his enemy and completely overwhelmed Gunzou in their initial fight so I think he'll be a major obstacle, it should be interesting to see their rematch assuming that Takao joins Gunzou's fleet.

None of the characters really stand out enough to have a clear cut favorite for me at the moment, but I'm interested to know what the heck is up with Yamato so she's my current favorite ship.

Yeah it's a fog ship, he is serving under Gunzou father. He even refers to him as their savior.

Finally peeled myself away from Guild Wars long enough to get around to reading some of this, had it sitting on my HD for a while.

Only read up to ch 17 so far and great stuff but then generally anything to do with naval warfare I think is great stuff but I love what they have done here.

Bringing old warships into the picture with some little upgrades, I like that alot. This is the kinda naval warfare manga I've been looking for.

I think my only gripe with this story will probably be with the father, I'm not fond of mistaken intentions or fake villain, you know he's doing this for the greater good crap.
I can see that happening here.

But still in the end I'm really in it for the warships and battles.

Atm Takao is my fav, don't know why but she's just <3:D

EDIT: Caught up with the rest and man, theres good reason why I just lovve Takao lol.

And man does ch 23 end of quite a cliffhanger!

Totally looking forward to more of this since I don't think I'll be seeing more of Kurogane Pukapuka Tai:(

He wants a new world order. So it'll end up being a battle of ideologies between him and his son I guess.