I like Bubblegum Crisis quite a lot! And that's why I watched this show, which has significant overlap in creative team and was as an earlier project featuring a lot of the same ideas that would later be reworked into BGC. Power-suits combine with motorbikes to become larger power-suits, a main character leads a double life as a no-nonsense pilot and a flashy songstress, there's a tough biker lady (although in this show, those last two things are separate characters, and would be combined to produce BGC's Priss), and the music forms a strong part of the show's identity.
It'd probably be cool to say I unearthed a secret gem that actually blows its better-known successor out of the water, but nah, this one's "aight, I guess". I'm glad I watched it! But it's definitely someone's early work. A lot of episodes feel built around trying to replicate a cool dramatic moment they saw in another show, without much thought for how to actually do the work to build to that moment. And there's a not-insignificant number of moments that make me want to grab the presumable-straight-man who wrote this and go "oh, grow up".
But if the substance is all over the place, the style is the real vision, and a lot of that is wrapped up in far and away the best character, Yellow Belmont; the aforementioned singer, whose soldier identity is a man while her stage persona is a woman, and you do get the sense this goes beyond cross-dressing to really be a part of his self-conception, the way she playfully switches between voices in casual conversation. Both her voice actors provide songs for the soundtrack, and he often performs them in-show; this is a weekly TV anime and they don't have the budget to do what BGC did with its album-per-episode extravaganza, but again you can see the concept developing.
I was gonna say some other stuff, but man, I just love Yellow. Not that the show is a trans thesis statement or anything, but there aren't any of the man-in-dress jokes you're bracing for. The show loves her. She's the biggest ladykiller in the whole cast. There's an epilogue OVA and it's almost entirely about him. She's the perfect man. He's my dream girl.
Anyway, this sure is a show produced in the wake of Macross to try and get in on that Macross money, and one day Harmony Gold sure did look at it and go "hey, that looks like Macross", and I guess now it's fuckin part of Robotech. I haven't seen Robotech (except like 5 episodes on a second-hand VHS once). Or Macross. I could watch Macross and find out what everyone is talking about, but it'd be kinda funny if instead I just watched this and Southern Cross (the other non-Macross thing Robotech was assembled out of). (This is a joke. I know what I'm watching next and it's not any of these things.)
What was I saying? This show's fine. In one episode the Mazingolfer Z shitpost happens almost word for word. Points for that.