Didn't want to hold up another thread, so...

[Alrik Vas]

Seto Kaiba mentioned in another thread that he doesn't have personal mega damage weapons and armor in his RT/Macross games. I was just curious if anyone else does that, and also for Kaiba: How do you reconcile having no MD personal weapons or cyclones when these take out invid during the series?

Not callin' you out or anything, but I'm curious if you have things like invid scouts be SDC, or if the eyes in said units are...maybe i'm confused on what you said, just trying to get some clarification.

[glitterboy2098]

Seto has mentioned before he doesn't actually play the robotech setting, but rather games set in the various SDF:Macross spinoffs like Macross Frontier and Macross II.
he just uses the 2nd ed rules (heavily modified) and the Shadow chronicles rpg's Macross Era sourcebook (also heavily modified to meet what he see's as the 'accurate' details for SDF:macross) to create the foundation for the stuff he wrote himself for those settings.

[Alrik Vas]

Seto has mentioned before he doesn't actually play the robotech setting, but rather games set in the various SDF:Macross spinoffs like Macross Frontier and Macross II.
he just uses the 2nd ed rules (heavily modified) and the Shadow chronicles rpg's Macross Era sourcebook (also heavily modified to meet what he see's as the 'accurate' details for SDF:macross) to create the foundation for the stuff he wrote himself for those settings.

Yeah, i caught all that, my issue is that he mentioned "not even cyclones" which suggests (and i could just be incorrectly assuming here) that he has cyclones in his games, and they are not MDC.

Now, if he's playing Macross and following the way that setting tends to go and the things it deals with, then his general statement works out. I was just confused by the mention of non MDC cyclones and had to wonder how they would interact with Invid.

[glitterboy2098]

presumably he imported cyclones into the setting.. after all with things like the EX-gear of Macross Frontier the tech is there. he just may not use Invid. or if he did, he may have downgraded them similarly to cyclones.

[Seto Kaiba]

Seto Kaiba mentioned in another thread that he doesn't have personal mega damage weapons and armor in his RT/Macross games. [...]

True. While I've only (personally) run one Robotech game, and my preference is to use the Robotech and/or the Macross II books to run games purely in the Macross universe(s), it's always been my habit to roll through those books and correct Palladium's stats into something more closely resembling canon and the OSM. The absence of MDC body armor and weaponry for infantry is one such correction.

I was just curious if anyone else does that, and also for Kaiba: How do you reconcile having no MD personal weapons or cyclones when these take out invid during the series?

Oh, it's reconciled easily enough when you're correcting the stats using OSM information. You see, the Genesis Climber MOSPEADA series was not what you'd call a "MDC setting". It was actually the least advanced, technologically, of the original three shows used to make Robotech. As a result, there are a lot of glaring cases where it's easy enough for viewers to spot the problems. Because there are many examples of the Gallant/H90 and the other small arms not being a megadeath nastier than modern ordinance, like the first shot we ever see a Gallant fire, I treat them more or less as their original creators intended... as a substitute for modern small arms, which are also not MDC weapons. Consequentially, my stats (and those my friend Greg is working on for his GCM game) for the Inbit/Invid are purely SDC. It's backed up with a decent AR, but it's still SDC. The Gallant/H90 "Laser Hound", the SAL-9, FAL-2, the laser submachine gun, thes are simply treated like modern rifles. The larger particle beam weapons carried by the Ride Armors are treated like anti-tank rifles or similar, since they have much more power behind each shot. Missiles are treated like anti-tank rockets.

Body armor is treated the same way. CVR-3 is nice armor, and we treat is as having excellent resistance to laser weapons (via ablation and insulation), but if it were MDC armor then Scott's merry band should've been able to laugh off the MANY times they were threatened with old-fashioned small arms like Rainy Boy's pump-action slugthrower.

EDIT: As a side note, the helpfully-quantified muzzle energy of the RT-exclusive VR-057's twin-barreled railgun is only 70kJ, and working from that and its caliber it can be determined with reasonable certainty that it's actually not any better than a modern 20mm cannon. The only difference is that it's theoretically man-portable.

To be fair, I do the same with EX-Gear and the linear rifle they usually carry in my Macross game... the linear rifle's a fairly powerful anti-tank rifle with AP rounds, but just like in Macross Frontier the only thing it'll do to a MDC-armored target is annoy it. (Like how Gilliam tried and failed to menace an adult Vajra with his linear rifle in Macross Frontier's first episode, and ended up as a flightsuit of chunky tomato soup for his trouble.) Likewise, immature Vajra would also be SDC targets since MDC weapons outright annihilate them, but they can be hurt or killed by small arms or high-power SDC weapons like the aforementioned linear rifle.

In my games, to justify having MDC armor or being a mega-damage weapon, something needs to be either ridiculously hard to kill or ridiculously powerful. The VF-0, for instance, has armor no thicker than a modern jet fighter, but its toughness is comparable to the thickest armor of a main battle tank... and its armor is far and away the lightest of all VFs. Weapons in Macross are preposterously powerful... which is why they almost invariably rate as mega-damage weapons.

Not callin' you out or anything, but I'm curious if you have things like invid scouts be SDC, or if the eyes in said units are...maybe i'm confused on what you said, just trying to get some clarification.

Well... drat. Can we at least bicker acrimoniously? I have a quota to fill. (Just kidding!)

See, if it weren't for a few rare instances where a standard scale character uses a standard scale weapon to take out an out of scale threat, I would go this route as well.

I just treat those as incredibly lucky shots... which they are, since those feats seldom happen more than once. I favor the more hectic tone combat takes when players caught outside their mecha have to make do with what they have. It may be that my players do better under pressure, however. I tend to find their solutions more interesting (and often, more deadly) when they're genuinely worried they're going to be mowed down by grunts and have to think on their feet.

he just uses the 2nd ed rules (heavily modified) and the Shadow chronicles rpg's Macross Era sourcebook (also heavily modified to meet what he see's as the 'accurate' details for SDF:macross) to create the foundation for the stuff he wrote himself for those settings.

To be fair, the detail available in the OSM is often enough that if I have one item I use as a starting point for gauging how much MDC or mega-damage is appropriate, I can simply scale it appropriately using the wealth of available detail. There's some cases, especially the VF-0, VF-1, VF-19, and VF-25, where I almost have TOO MUCH information and just ballpark a number because working the scale factor out to individual bullet grain weights is too much effort.

(The level of detail can be really head-crushing... I can tell you what changed between all 17 production blocks of the VF-1, for instance.)

Yeah, i caught all that, my issue is that he mentioned "not even cyclones" which suggests (and i could just be incorrectly assuming here) that he has cyclones in his games, and they are not MDC.

Well, I'm helping a friend write his own GCM game... but we have had Cyclones from RT appear in our periodic "crossovers" with a friend's Robotech game.

Now, if he's playing Macross and following the way that setting tends to go and the things it deals with, then his general statement works out. I was just confused by the mention of non MDC cyclones and had to wonder how they would interact with Invid.

Macross is very firmly a MDC setting... it's hard to argue that, when a few millimeters of plate metal has more damage resistance than a main battle tank, when megawatt lasers are almost laughed out of town as insufficiently powerful, and a more modern fighter can take a railgun that lops superdense penetrators at over 7.5km/s (that's Mach 22) like it's nothing.

Robotech is harder to classify. In a lot of ways, the existing RT material downgrades the performance of the mecha considerably, which consequentially takes them more towards the SDC end of the spectrum. The Macross Saga book has the mecha armed and armored with more conventional options than anything in the OSM. The latter two sagas are a LOT more problematic, because OSM-wise the tech level is one long downward trend after Macross. There's very little in terms of viable information for Southern Cross, so it's hard to tell where precisely that sits, though it's more likely an advanced SDC setting rather than MDC. MOSPEADA is definitely SDC, where a megawatt laser is a BFG and ordinance in general is pretty underwhelming.

(To put it in perspective, the OSM VF-1's two engines have a peak output of 1300MW... while the OSM Legioss, which RT calls the Alpha, barely tops 3MW. Compare THAT to Macross II's VF-2SS, which tops 3,900MW...)

[Alpha 11]

Seto Kaiba mentioned in another thread that he doesn't have personal mega damage weapons and armor in his RT/Macross games. [...]

True. While I've only (personally) run one Robotech game, and my preference is to use the Robotech and/or the Macross II books to run games purely in the Macross universe(s), it's always been my habit to roll through those books and correct Palladium's stats into something more closely resembling canon and the OSM. The absence of MDC body armor and weaponry for infantry is one such correction.

I was just curious if anyone else does that, and also for Kaiba: How do you reconcile having no MD personal weapons or cyclones when these take out invid during the series?

Oh, it's reconciled easily enough when you're correcting the stats using OSM information. You see, the Genesis Climber MOSPEADA series was not what you'd call a "MDC setting". It was actually the least advanced, technologically, of the original three shows used to make Robotech. As a result, there are a lot of glaring cases where it's easy enough for viewers to spot the problems. Because there are many examples of the Gallant/H90 and the other small arms not being a megadeath nastier than modern ordinance, like the first shot we ever see a Gallant fire, I treat them more or less as their original creators intended... as a substitute for modern small arms, which are also not MDC weapons. Consequentially, my stats (and those my friend Greg is working on for his GCM game) for the Inbit/Invid are purely SDC. It's backed up with a decent AR, but it's still SDC. The Gallant/H90 "Laser Hound", the SAL-9, FAL-2, the laser submachine gun, thes are simply treated like modern rifles. The larger particle beam weapons carried by the Ride Armors are treated like anti-tank rifles or similar, since they have much more power behind each shot. Missiles are treated like anti-tank rockets.

Body armor is treated the same way. CVR-3 is nice armor, and we treat is as having excellent resistance to laser weapons (via ablation and insulation), but if it were MDC armor then Scott's merry band should've been able to laugh off the MANY times they were threatened with old-fashioned small arms like Rainy Boy's pump-action slugthrower.

EDIT: As a side note, the helpfully-quantified muzzle energy of the RT-exclusive VR-057's twin-barreled railgun is only 70kJ, and working from that and its caliber it can be determined with reasonable certainty that it's actually not any better than a modern 20mm cannon. The only difference is that it's theoretically man-portable.

To be fair, I do the same with EX-Gear and the linear rifle they usually carry in my Macross game... the linear rifle's a fairly powerful anti-tank rifle with AP rounds, but just like in Macross Frontier the only thing it'll do to a MDC-armored target is annoy it. (Like how Gilliam tried and failed to menace an adult Vajra with his linear rifle in Macross Frontier's first episode, and ended up as a flightsuit of chunky tomato soup for his trouble.) Likewise, immature Vajra would also be SDC targets since MDC weapons outright annihilate them, but they can be hurt or killed by small arms or high-power SDC weapons like the aforementioned linear rifle.

In my games, to justify having MDC armor or being a mega-damage weapon, something needs to be either ridiculously hard to kill or ridiculously powerful. The VF-0, for instance, has armor no thicker than a modern jet fighter, but its toughness is comparable to the thickest armor of a main battle tank... and its armor is far and away the lightest of all VFs. Weapons in Macross are preposterously powerful... which is why they almost invariably rate as mega-damage weapons.

Not callin' you out or anything, but I'm curious if you have things like invid scouts be SDC, or if the eyes in said units are...maybe i'm confused on what you said, just trying to get some clarification.

Well... drat. Can we at least bicker acrimoniously? I have a quota to fill. (Just kidding!)

See, if it weren't for a few rare instances where a standard scale character uses a standard scale weapon to take out an out of scale threat, I would go this route as well.

I just treat those as incredibly lucky shots... which they are, since those feats seldom happen more than once. I favor the more hectic tone combat takes when players caught outside their mecha have to make do with what they have. It may be that my players do better under pressure, however. I tend to find their solutions more interesting (and often, more deadly) when they're genuinely worried they're going to be mowed down by grunts and have to think on their feet.

he just uses the 2nd ed rules (heavily modified) and the Shadow chronicles rpg's Macross Era sourcebook (also heavily modified to meet what he see's as the 'accurate' details for SDF:macross) to create the foundation for the stuff he wrote himself for those settings.

To be fair, the detail available in the OSM is often enough that if I have one item I use as a starting point for gauging how much MDC or mega-damage is appropriate, I can simply scale it appropriately using the wealth of available detail. There's some cases, especially the VF-0, VF-1, VF-19, and VF-25, where I almost have TOO MUCH information and just ballpark a number because working the scale factor out to individual bullet grain weights is too much effort.

(The level of detail can be really head-crushing... I can tell you what changed between all 17 production blocks of the VF-1, for instance.)

Yeah, i caught all that, my issue is that he mentioned "not even cyclones" which suggests (and i could just be incorrectly assuming here) that he has cyclones in his games, and they are not MDC.

Well, I'm helping a friend write his own GCM game... but we have had Cyclones from RT appear in our periodic "crossovers" with a friend's Robotech game.

Now, if he's playing Macross and following the way that setting tends to go and the things it deals with, then his general statement works out. I was just confused by the mention of non MDC cyclones and had to wonder how they would interact with Invid.

Macross is very firmly a MDC setting... it's hard to argue that, when a few millimeters of plate metal has more damage resistance than a main battle tank, when megawatt lasers are almost laughed out of town as insufficiently powerful, and a more modern fighter can take a railgun that lops superdense penetrators at over 7.5km/s (that's Mach 22) like it's nothing.

Robotech is harder to classify. In a lot of ways, the existing RT material downgrades the performance of the mecha considerably, which consequentially takes them more towards the SDC end of the spectrum. The Macross Saga book has the mecha armed and armored with more conventional options than anything in the OSM. The latter two sagas are a LOT more problematic, because OSM-wise the tech level is one long downward trend after Macross. There's very little in terms of viable information for Southern Cross, so it's hard to tell where precisely that sits, though it's more likely an advanced SDC setting rather than MDC. MOSPEADA is definitely SDC, where a megawatt laser is a BFG and ordinance in general is pretty underwhelming.

(To put it in perspective, the OSM VF-1's two engines have a peak output of 1300MW... while the OSM Legioss, which RT calls the Alpha, barely tops 3MW. Compare THAT to Macross II's VF-2SS, which tops 3,900MW...)

Loved reading what you've done. I would not mind at all sitting in on one of your games or just reading your stuff.

[ShadowLogan]

Seto Kaiba mentioned in another thread that he doesn't have personal mega damage weapons and armor in his RT/Macross games. I was just curious if anyone else does that, and also for Kaiba: How do you reconcile having no MD personal weapons or cyclones when these take out invid during the series?

Well Rifts Conversion Book 1(revised) does have conversion notes for turning it into an MDC setting into a purely SDC one. These are loose (ie general), but still very workable (the most effort is likely the assignment of ARs, which would be natural AR instead of artificial AR).

So everything with MD/MDC gets revamped as SD/SDC, which would include the Invid (and it is not at 1:100 ratio).

[Seto Kaiba]

Loved reading what you've done. I would not mind at all sitting in on one of your games or just reading your stuff.

That may be workable.

Well Rifts Conversion Book 1(revised) does have conversion notes for turning it into an MDC setting into a purely SDC one. These are loose (ie general), but still very workable (the most effort is likely the assignment of ARs, which would be natural AR instead of artificial AR).

Hm... y'know, I didn't know Palladium had put out a guide for that. We've been doing these conversions by hand, and simply fine tuning everything with judicious amounts of play-testing. Admittedly, in both MOSPEADA/RT and our work for that Macross Frontier-era game we're doing, balancing the SDC anti-personnel weapons is something of a challenge. In our GCM/RT stats, the FAL-2 and laser submachine pistol proved to be the worst problem children, since most of the targets the guns would be used against are either hard-armored Inbit or totally unarmored humans. We dodged that problem when we'd worked out the EX-Gear's linear rifle for Macross Frontier, since it's basically the same sort of weapon as the RT "Super Cyclone" railgun... an anti-tank/anti-materiel linear rifle. It'll wreck the hell out of an unmodified human, but against targets like combat cyborgs and Zentradi infantry, it takes a bit of doing to bring one down.

[glitterboy2098]

the conversion book 1 guide is largely useless.. it basically says "just replace MDC with SDC, and assign an AR."
as written, a weapon that does 4D6md would just become 4D6sd, and a rifts main battle tank with 500 mdc main body would have only 500sdc with an AR.

in short, infantry gear kinda works, but vehicles are screwed over. and even then, some of the weaker MDC stuff really gets screwed.

most people i know have houseruled more detailed rules, with vehicles, especially combatvehicles, receiving some multipliers to the armor and weapons damage to make them fit into the existing SDC stuff.

[Alrik Vas]

Thanks for the clarification, Kaiba. I agree with what you said. I think pretty much, if you have a sup0r l4z0r of terrorz mounted on your VF-5000 it should basically vaporize a man in body armor, not do 30 MD to his 50 MDC protection.

[Seto Kaiba]

the conversion book 1 guide is largely useless.. it basically says "just replace MDC with SDC, and assign an AR."
as written, a weapon that does 4D6md would just become 4D6sd, and a rifts main battle tank with 500 mdc main body would have only 500sdc with an AR.

in short, infantry gear kinda works, but vehicles are screwed over. and even then, some of the weaker MDC stuff really gets screwed.

All the same, I may just buy that book outta morbid curiosity. It'll be my first-ever RIFTS purchase.

Thanks for the clarification, Kaiba. I agree with what you said. I think pretty much, if you have a sup0r l4z0r of terrorz mounted on your VF-5000 it should basically vaporize a man in body armor, not do 30 MD to his 50 MDC protection.

Yep, that's my thought on the matter... an unmodified human in body armor should have reasonable protection against any small arms, but he shouldn't be shrugging off direct hits from a multi-megawatt beam weapon firing thousands of shots per minute.

[jaymz]

Seto - Don;t bother, the SDC conversion ratio is 1-1 so that VF-1 would go from 360 MDC to 360 SDC or the same amount as a moderately sized passenger car....it was definitely NOT thought out very much.

I have my own way to convert to SDC and it works out better in my opinion.

[Jefffar]

Where did the 70kJ for the Railgun come from?

As a person who places the .50 BMG (<20kJ) as the dividing line between MDC and SDC weapons it still leaves the weapon on the MDC side of the line.

Incidentally, there are a few layers of 20mm cannons, for example the M61 Vulcan comes in at around 54kJ. So the Railgun is definitely a healthy weapon. Though not quite up there with a 25mm (approx 100kJ)

[jaymz]

I think it actually states 70kj IN RT TSC Jefffar....I'll have to double check though

[Jefffar]

After some math the most potent 20mms out there (ie a 20x139 round from an Rh 202 or Oerlikon KAD) comes it at approx 71kJ. So the figure would be a top end 20mm (and more powerful than the most potent 20mm Anti-Materiel Rifles which generally fires much less potent rounds).

[jaymz]

Ok no mention of the 71kj in the rpg but the railgun DOES use a 20mm "round"

[Seto Kaiba]

Where did the 70kJ for the Railgun come from?

The Art of Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles, VR-057 Super Cyclone entry.

[jaymz]

Thanks Seto...I knew it was in A book just thought the WRONG book

[Jefffar]

Alright, so we have a weapon comperable in performance to a high end 20mm cannon firing APDS ammo with considerably less recoil (Railguns do not have propelling gas recoiling with the shot so have less recoil and no need for muzzle breaks - though due to the energies involved a flash suppressor wouldn't be a bad thing, plasma can form from the friction of the round moving down the rails).

The weapon also outperforms the usual 60mm beam weapon carried by the VR-052.

[Seto Kaiba]

Thanks Seto...I knew it was in A book just thought the WRONG book

No problem. It stuck in my memory, because it's a level of detail that we don't typically get in Robotech material... so that really stood out among the other vague generalities.

Alright, so we have a weapon comperable in performance to a high end 20mm cannon firing APDS ammo with considerably less recoil (Railguns do not have propelling gas recoiling with the shot so have less recoil [...]

Recoil forces produced by a railgun are largely dependent on the type of armature used. In most cases, with conventional mechanical armature railguns you'll get close to the same amount of recoil force you would with chemically-driven cannons, though alternatives like plasma armatures reduce this somewhat by eliminating the physical connection between the bullet and the rail. We don't see the HRG-70 in a configuration that's not mounted on a powered suit and fired while the user is braced. Thus we can't really say that there's considerably less recoil involved, as the armor may be taking the brunt of it for the wearer.

The weapon also outperforms the usual 60mm beam weapon carried by the VR-052.

That's not really a ringing endorsement, in the context of this thread... though we have yet to actually get a reasonable comparison between the two in any animated form.

[ShadowLogan]

Seto - Don;t bother, the SDC conversion ratio is 1-1 so that VF-1 would go from 360 MDC to 360 SDC or the same amount as a moderately sized passenger car....it was definitely NOT thought out very much.

I have my own way to convert to SDC and it works out better in my opinion.

I agree with jaymz and glitterboy here. The book isn't really worth it if you are just after the loose SDC rules that are spread out over a few pages that basically boil down to 1:1, and put a AR range in for a given category. They do allow for high tech weapons to get a boost though (missiles and vibro weapons come with it automatically, but other types don't aside from a recommend range if it is felt they need a boost).

I do disagree with them about them being workable, things can feel out of scale, but that is a feature in MDC so nothing new there.

[jaymz]

Thus why I also said I have my own way of doing it that i feel does work