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If one were to watch accurate translation subtitles of Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross and Genesis Climber MOSPEADA rather than the redubbed and collected Robotech, would this leave one with major misconceptions as to the plotlines and characters and realities?

I'm aware there were some major changes and that the link between Macross+Southern Cross was tenuous (though subtle since they're both Super Dimension series) and that MOSPEADA was entirely unrelated, but didn't want to go too far into the details lest there be memorable spoilers.

Basically, if one watches the subs of these 3 series, would it still be worth watching the English dubs of Robotech afterward to understand the differences and the gaming universe Palladium presents?

Also would it count as 'conversion' to discuss how the original 3 animes would be played as opposed to whatever changes the Robotech dubbing made to them?

Is it acceptable to discuss material presented in other Macross animes, like Macross Zero or Macross Frontier?

Tor wrote:If one were to watch accurate translation subtitles of Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross and Genesis Climber MOSPEADA rather than the redubbed and collected Robotech, would this leave one with major misconceptions as to the plotlines and characters and realities?

Yes.

(Just read some of the older posts on here if you want a real graphic demonstration of how bad that can get. It won't be quite as bad on the terminology front now that the revised RPG is copying more and more OSM terminology, but you'll get a lot of people asking why you're powering your robots with an extinct civilization, for starters.)

Tor wrote:I'm aware there were some major changes and that the link between Macross+Southern Cross was tenuous (though subtle since they're both Super Dimension series) and that MOSPEADA was entirely unrelated, but didn't want to go too far into the details lest there be memorable spoilers.

Hey, there's one of those misconceptions right there! (In bold!)

Apart from the fact that the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross and the Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross series were sponsored by the same company (Big West Advertising Co. Ltd.) and that Southern Cross used one of the production houses that jointly animated Macross (Tatsunoko Pro.), the two have NOTHING linking them... there are no story-related connections between the two shows. That all three were animated, in whole or in part, by Tatsunoko is the one thing that actually connects them. (Unless you want to count that MOSPEADA and Southern Cross were both strongly influenced by Macross's success in Japan, and sought to copy it, with little success.)

Tor wrote:Basically, if one watches the subs of these 3 series, would it still be worth watching the English dubs of Robotech afterward to understand the differences and the gaming universe Palladium presents?

Probably, yes... because the settings of the original three shows are very different from that of Robotech, particularly when it comes to aspects of backstory, in-universe history, terminology, technology, faction motivation, and so on.

Tor wrote:Also would it count as 'conversion' to discuss how the original 3 animes would be played as opposed to whatever changes the Robotech dubbing made to them?

S'long as you don't discuss the crunchy aspects of it, it should be fine... I've talked a fair bit about what I've done as far as using Palladium's old and new RT RPGs to run pure Macross setting games before, and nobody in the mod staff has ever given me flak for it.

Tor wrote:Is it acceptable to discuss material presented in other Macross animes, like Macross Zero or Macross Frontier?

As long as we don't get into the crunchy stuff, which is verboten according to the rules, that's fine...

Differences between the originals and Robotech oh let me count the ways.....nah we don't have that much time really but yes there are significant differences as Seto already pointed out.

As for conversions? As long as you do not present actual palladium systems stats, you can even discuss hard tech data but if in doubt on some level ask Jefffar. He is likely the most in tune Mod for Robotech specific forums.


As for the game.....I've rewritten all of the game stats to be more accurate with a lot of assistance from Seto and have done stats for the original macross (a lot of aesthetic differences if not statistical ones) as well as it's sequels and plan to do the other two original settings at some point. I just felt the game as done wasn't accurate enough for my tastes.

Its well worth watching both series for their own sake. If you want to disguss stuff n how it would effect game play,by all means. Just no stats. Its mostly gonna be back ground stuff.

Personally I enjoy all of it.

I would say that watching Macross, both the original and the later editions is pretty much a great idea-- Macross's later series and movies were far superior to what HG put out, and the story line holds together far better.

Tor wrote:If one were to watch accurate translation subtitles of Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross and Genesis Climber MOSPEADA rather than the redubbed and collected Robotech, would this leave one with major misconceptions as to the plotlines and characters and realities

YES. While I have not seen SDF:M in its original form w/subtitles, I have seen the other two in original form on multiple occasions so will focus on those to.

The last two are entirely different in setting. SDC:SC takes place on an alien world with TWO moons and is a colony world (and not a branch Earth Colony either), and chronologically takes place farther in the future than GCM which takes place in the 2080s (IINM) on Earth. In GCM the Inbit have been on Earth far longer than the Invid (IIRC, its like 30years vs 15 or 5 depending on which RT universe one looks at, old school novel based would be 5 more current is 15 if one is wondering about the difference).

Tor wrote:Basically, if one watches the subs of these 3 series, would it still be worth watching the English dubs of Robotech afterward to understand the differences and the gaming universe Palladium presents?

YES it would be worth it.

I do not think of Robotech as a dub of the 3 original series would be an entirely accurate as the settings and such where re-written among other things to make the 3-act-as-1, which isn't what I would expect in a simple dub of the series. While they share the same footage, dialogue is slightly different (to be expected in my XP), the background and such done to link them takes it beyond a simple dub.

Tor wrote:Also would it count as 'conversion' to discuss how the original 3 animes would be played as opposed to whatever changes the Robotech dubbing made to them?

Is it acceptable to discuss material presented in other Macross animes, like Macross Zero or Macross Frontier?

I don't think it would count as "conversion" as long as you avoid actual game mechanic stats. Though when it doubt ask a Mod.

Playing in the 3 OSM settings would be possible with the existing RPG books, one merely has to adjust setting stuff. Though some fine-tuning may be necessary depending on taste in gameplay vs series portrayal (given PB's issue with scale in the system).

mech798 wrote:I would say that watching Macross, both the original and the later editions is pretty much a great idea-- Macross's later series and movies were far superior to what HG put out, and the story line holds together far better.

's not entirely fair to judge Robotech against the originals on the ground of coherence... after all, the originals (and the Macross sequels) are the story the creators meant to tell and thus naturally hold up better with fewer plot holes. The Robotech version was hacked together with little or no prep time and on an almost inhumanely tight schedule, so it's a natural consequence that the quality would suffer accordingly.

ShadowLogan wrote:The last two are entirely different in setting. SDC:SC takes place on an alien world with TWO moons and is a colony world (and not a branch Earth Colony either), and chronologically takes place farther in the future than GCM which takes place in the 2080s (IINM) on Earth.

Eh... calling Glorie a "colony world" doesn't really capture the nature of it. The reason humanity was developing settlements on planets outside the Sol system wasn't because they'd got the itch to explore, it's because they had no choice. They up and fled the Sol system for Liberte and (later) Glorie because nuclear warfare had rendered Earth uninhabitable and plunged the planet into a nuclear winter. Glorie was kind of a dump too, being that it has an elliptical orbit of 73 Earth years, and it was a borderline ice planet before the terraforming started. (Some of the magazine coverage of the series before the show got canned suggests that Glorie may have just finished recovering from a nuclear winter that had forced the Zor to leave it when humanity started colonizing the planet.)

ShadowLogan wrote:In GCM the Inbit have been on Earth far longer than the Invid (IIRC, its like 30years vs 15 or 5 depending on which RT universe one looks at, old school novel based would be 5 more current is 15 if one is wondering about the difference).

A hair over 30 years, yeah... though in the original MOSPEADA setting, Earth's government and military weren't exactly in fantastic shape when the Inbit arrived. They weren't in nearly as bad a shape as in the Robotech version, but they were still busy picking up the pieces after losing the war(s) of independence in which Mars and Jupiter colonies successfully seceded from Earth's government. Between Luna's coping with the influx of refugees from Earth and the development of an entirely new combat methodology for dealing with the Inbit, it took the colonies 30 years to put together the first offensive (launched in 2080) that failed so disastrously, and another three years to assemble the second (where the story starts) to attack in 2083. So, give or take a few weeks, 33 years from the Inbit's actual invasion to the start of the series proper.

ShadowLogan wrote:Playing in the 3 OSM settings would be possible with the existing RPG books, one merely has to adjust setting stuff. Though some fine-tuning may be necessary depending on taste in gameplay vs series portrayal (given PB's issue with scale in the system).

Eh... that depends in large measure on how closely the GM intends to follow the setting, story, etc. of the original Japanese versions. Running MOSPEADA with the RTSC core book, New Generation, and Genesis Pits would require scrapping the majority of the latter two books, tossing everything Haydonite related, the Invid Overlord, Bioroid interceptor, etc.; tossing the specs for the fighters, revising the weapons, and a whole bunch of other stuff besides to get in into something vaguely resembling parity with the original MOSPEADA setting. Southern Cross... might actually be the easiest, since its tech specs are so vague and thin on the ground that about all you'd need to do to make it fit is replace the Spartas' main mount with a laser (no particle knockback, no solid shells), scrap the Myrmidon, and then relabel any "powered armor" into regular ~6m tall walkers.

The Macross Saga sourcebook can be used almost as-is, with minor revisions to the gunpod ammo and what missile type is what, though it's missing various setting aspects and technologies like the postwar blocks of the VF-1, the Strike pack, and other tech items like energy conversion armor, anti-beam coatings, active stealth, and the like. 'course if you intend to go beyond 2011 with it, there's a lot more than needs to be revised, like including the VF-1 Plus family of block upgrades, the VF-4, and other developments of that period.

Robotech.com lists some 70% of the earth's surface as having been destroyed....the numbers are similar in the Macross OSM. If you consider most population centers and military bases as having been the first targets, then a case can easily be made that some 98% of the population of the earth died instantly. the other 2% had to clean up the mess, bury bodies, had food shortages etc. as a result. many of them would have got sick and got dieseases from that...so lets say another half of thouse folks died. on a world with a current population of about 7 billion...that cuts the existing world population to about 70 million humans.... in macross we are told that some 1000 of bretai's ships survived...and thouse would have lost many of their troops.... so perhaps a few million zentraedi were added to that population...plus refuges / malcontents from the zentraedi main battle fleet.... maybe another million more. Macross tells us that cloning was used to beef up the population for the emigrant fleets especially.

sirkermittsg wrote:Robotech.com lists some 70% of the earth's surface as having been destroyed....the numbers are similar in the Macross OSM. If you consider most population centers and military bases as having been the first targets, then a case can easily be made that some 98% of the population of the earth died instantly. the other 2% had to clean up the mess, bury bodies, had food shortages etc. as a result. many of them would have got sick and got dieseases from that...so lets say another half of thouse folks died. on a world with a current population of about 7 billion...that cuts the existing world population to about 70 million humans.... in macross we are told that some 1000 of bretai's ships survived...and thouse would have lost many of their troops.... so perhaps a few million zentraedi were added to that population...plus refuges / malcontents from the zentraedi main battle fleet.... maybe another million more. Macross tells us that cloning was used to beef up the population for the emigrant fleets especially.

I use this scale or close to it in my Robotech games. Seto has stated that in macross zero humans survived the Zent. Attack. And they resort to cloning the human survivors of the SDF 1 to expand the human race.

I just have a hard time believing that Lisa and Edwards would be the only two survivors of the grand cannon. and that they were the only two to survivors of the whole world.

sirkermittsg wrote:Robotech.com lists some 70% of the earth's surface as having been destroyed....the numbers are similar in the Macross OSM.

No, they are not.

Briefly putting aside the way that the Robotech.com "70%" figure is both misleading and superficially not in line with the dialogue of the series, the surface of the Earth was COMPLETELY destroyed in Macross. That is why, in Macross, the only survivors are those who were not on Earth's surface at all. Namely, the million survivors were either 6km underground in the Grand Cannons, up in space aboard the Macross, or in the space colony clusters and frontline observer stations out at the Lagrange points.

I'm sure you'll agree there's a pretty big difference between 70% and 100%... though the 70% figure cited by Robotech.com is itself misleading, since 70% of Earth's surface is more than twice what's necessary to cover 100% of the planet's landmass twice over with room to spare.

sirkermittsg wrote:If you consider most population centers and military bases as having been the first targets, then a case can easily be made that some 98% of the population of the earth died instantly. [...] that cuts the existing world population to about 70 million humans.

But, in Macross sources, we are explicitly told that the total surviving human population is approximately 1 million... 100% of whom survived by dint of not being on Earth's surface when the bombardment started. The survivors were either 6km underground or out in space, nobody on the surface survived.

Of course, the Robotech series itself ALSO clearly and repeatedly indicates that 100% of the population actually living on Earth's surface was annihilated, with both the narrator (two years after the bombardment's conclusion) and Commander Leonard (seventeen years after the fact) confirming the total number of human survivors of the war at a mere 70,000.

sirkermittsg wrote:[...] in macross we are told that some 1000 of bretai's ships survived...and thouse would have lost many of their troops.... so perhaps a few million zentraedi were added to that population...plus refuges / malcontents from the zentraedi main battle fleet.... maybe another million more.

Official Macross sources do confirm that approximately 1,000 Zentradi ships joined the UN Forces, though their exact condition and original disposition is not entirely clear. The total number of Zentradi living on Earth's surface after the bombardment is estimated in some sources to have been approximately 8 million.

sirkermittsg wrote:Macross tells us that cloning was used to beef up the population for the emigrant fleets especially.

It was used, initially, to provide highly skilled crew in roles where training crew would take too long to meet the program's schedule, but was later expanded to the general population to beef up humanity's numbers. The end result being that, between the decade and a half of large-scale cloning and plenty of reproducing the good old fashioned way, humanity's population rebounded explosively and was into the hundreds of millions within half a century.

Lt Gargoyle wrote:Seto has stated that in macross zero humans survived the Zent. Attack. And they resort to cloning the human survivors of the SDF 1 to expand the human race.

Both true... we know of at least one major character from Macross Zero who did survive the wholesale destruction of Earth's surface, Mao Nome. Exactly HOW... well... we don't know. She was either under the surface in Grand Cannon III or V, or in space in a colony cluster or other base.

Lt Gargoyle wrote:I just have a hard time believing that Lisa and Edwards would be the only two survivors of the grand cannon. and that they were the only two to survivors of the whole world.

's not that hard... Robotech says flat out that the bombardment completely devastated Earth's surface, and the Grand Cannon in that version of events was the only one (the RPG's claims to the contrary having no foundation in canon) and between the bombardment and the subsequent mess it was practically falling apart when it exploded. The other one that was under construction was blown up by Leonard's terrorists a couple years before the war even started...

the dialog does not match up with what is drawn.

I suspect that the 70% is referring to the land...not the oceans. there are lots of boats and ships in the oceans....and submarines as well. I suspect many of thouse vessels may have survived...and at any given time there are millions of people on the water from cruise ships and commercial vessels, to private boating and military vessels....which there were a bunch of including the submersible Prometheus and Dadelous type carriers.

Total devestation would in general mean that the forests were obliterated and the land sterilized.
Yet, Khyron/ Kamjin Kravshera and Azonia /Moruk Laplamiz are shown operating out of a jungle base / ship within two years of the ROD and such base / ship is heavily overgrown in a large jungle. It would have taken many YEARS if not Decades for the ecosystem to return...including the large trees that are seen to be a part of that jungle. if trees could survive then people could have too....in thouse environments.

Remember the RPG itself which was approved by HG talks about survivors in various locations around the world including the antartic and south America.

I also consider the fact that shelters and military bunkers much like those on macross island would be in place within reach and people would have been evacuated to as the Zentraedi were staging for their assault.

And Seto and I disagree on this topic. I realize military intelligence is beyond flawed so when I hear a soldier tell his or her commanding officer the earth is totally devoid of life, I take it with a grain of salt. Since we do see that jungles with life survived.

sirkermittsg wrote:I suspect that the 70% is referring to the land...not the oceans. there are lots of boats and ships in the oceans....and submarines as well. I suspect many of thouse vessels may have survived...and at any given time there are millions of people on the water from cruise ships and commercial vessels, to private boating and military vessels....which there were a bunch of including the submersible Prometheus and Dadelous type carriers.

While yes, people could have survived/avoided the bombardment itself via a host of factors, one does have to consider loss of life post-event that trace back to the event itself destroying/damaging the infrastructure that humans are dependent upon for survival.

When you consider how much food and water are going to be necessary, and what it takes to distribute it.

Factor in lack of access to medical services (which may be no better than a First Aide Kit) for those injured or irradiated, and the count goes up.

Seto wrote:Of course, the Robotech series itself ALSO clearly and repeatedly indicates that 100% of the population actually living on Earth's surface was annihilated, with both the narrator (two years after the bombardment's conclusion) and Commander Leonard (seventeen years after the fact) confirming the total number of human survivors of the war at a mere 70,000.

No Robotech itself doesn't CLEARLY indicate 100%.

The Zentraedi did not devastate 100% of the surface (Ep35, Narrator), they only are indicated at 95%. So 5% of the surface escaped devastation. While population density would not result in a 5% survival rate, it leaves open the possibility of other survivors present in that 5% surface area that could survive. Ep28 points to scattered survivors by the narrator (no number), Ep29 then points to SDF-1/Macross City (which fluctuates between 70k and 56k prior to FoA), then we have Leonard's statement of 70k. However, all of these can have their meaning altered by context.

We see NYC (relatively) intact circa 204x. So if the City can survive the bombardment, the people living there should be able to in the short term (bombardment itself), though I do concede their long term ability to stay is unlikely due to a variety of factors (radiation, supplies, etc) that would require re-location of some/all of them.

As the Grand Cannon shows, people in suitable shelters/location could have survived the initial bombardment. What destroyed the Grand Cannon installation was a followup attack on the facility, and even here we see survivors from that attack (nearly all died).

sirkermittsg wrote:the dialog does not match up with what is drawn.

Actually, it does... because we never once see anything indicative of survivors other than those who weren't elsewhere when it went down. Even if the orbital bombardment didn't get 'em directly, there's always the shockwaves, the dust storms, starvation, dehydration, radiation sickness, and other alternatives for the population to be wiped out that all come bundled neatly with those massive, nuke-grade detonations.

sirkermittsg wrote:I suspect that the 70% is referring to the land...not the oceans.

Except that we clearly see the Zentradi were bombarding the entire surface of the planet, including the oceans.

sirkermittsg wrote:there are lots of boats and ships in the oceans....and submarines as well.

"Lots" is ambiguous... and the crews of those ships would be just as doomed as everyone else with the oceans being peppered by nuclear-scale bombardment, since that tends to generate large, nasty waves and submarines aren't exactly great when it comes to explosions occurring in the water near them (that being the whole idea behind torpedoes, depth charges, etc.).

sirkermittsg wrote:I suspect many of thouse vessels may have survived...and at any given time there are millions of people on the water from cruise ships and commercial vessels, to private boating and military vessels....which there were a bunch of including the submersible Prometheus and Dadelous type carriers.

And yet, there's not one single, solitary scrap of evidence to support your idea... never mind that the only known Daedalus-class assault ship and the only known Prometheus-class carrier were long gone by that time. It's also worth noting that neither ship was FULLY submersible. Both are semi-submersible... meaning they're meant to submerge partway, but leave elements of themselves above the waterline to provide air and other functionality. There's actually very nice art of the Prometheus running in semi-submersible configuration in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Valkyrie Vol.1.

sirkermittsg wrote:Yet, Khyron/ Kamjin Kravshera and Azonia /Moruk Laplamiz are shown operating out of a jungle base / ship within two years of the ROD and such base / ship is heavily overgrown in a large jungle. It would have taken many YEARS if not Decades for the ecosystem to return...including the large trees that are seen to be a part of that jungle. if trees could survive then people could have too....in thouse environments.

Inside of an ecological recovery area... and, quite frankly, in the original it's not exactly a tall order for humanity or even the Zentradi to create lifeforms using their cloning technology that are fully mature right off the bat. You'll want to note that the SHIP Kamjin recovers is overgrown, which could only happen if the foliage came AFTER the crash.

sirkermittsg wrote:Remember the RPG itself which was approved by HG talks about survivors in various locations around the world including the antartic and south America.

Yes, it does... but remember, "approved by" Harmony Gold just means that Tommy Yune looked at the book and said "Yeah, that's up to our standards, you can go ahead and print it". It doesn't mean that the contents of the RPG are canon or accurate in any way. Harmony Gold has never asserted or implied that they consider the RPG to be canon, which isn't at all surprising as the industry standard for licensed games is that they're not. The RPG only too often contradicts official materials for Robotech, and its talk about survivors in various other locations is one such contradiction.

ShadowLogan wrote:The Zentraedi did not devastate 100% of the surface (Ep35, Narrator), they only are indicated at 95%. So 5% of the surface escaped devastation. While population density would not result in a 5% survival rate, it leaves open the possibility of other survivors present in that 5% surface area that could survive.

Except that the narrator and Commander Leonard explicitly rule it out... and even the RPG agrees, before we go mincing words, that the term "Zentradi holocaust" refers to the bombardment itself.

ShadowLogan wrote:As the Grand Cannon shows, people in suitable shelters/location could have survived the initial bombardment. What destroyed the Grand Cannon installation was a followup attack on the facility, and even here we see survivors from that attack (nearly all died).

The Grand Cannon was in pretty rough shape even beforehand, as its own status reports indicate... and that was far and away the deepest bunker available on the planet. The series version of events also makes the Grand Cannon THE Grand Cannon, with no indication of other, similar installations the way the RPG claims... though that may be, in part or in full, because Leonard nuked the other one a few years before.




Bringing this back around to the actual topic of the thread... one such difference that's going to have to be adapted for in using the RPGs to play sessions set in the original Macross, Southern Cross, or MOSPEADA settings is the respective state of humanity. The Robotech RPG deviates heavily from the series and asserts much larger populations than were present post-bombardment, even by Macross's standards, though the population in that universe bounced back fairly swiftly using cloning technology. It's anybody's guess how many people actually live on Glorie in Southern Cross, though it's said to be sparsely populated and its military is (at least based on the org. chart that came with This is Animation 10: Southern Cross) actually quite small... maybe only a few tens of thousands in total, appropriate enough for a world that was only recently settled.

MOSPEADA's a bit more of a sticky wicket, since the bulk of humanity's population in that is forever offscreen and unmentioned, living in relative safety on the moon, on Mars, and in the vicinity of Jupiter. The Robotech canon specs and RPG both rather badly exaggerate the numbers of people involved in the Recapture missions, because they exaggerated the hell out of the ship specs. Apart from their nine pilots, the Garfish-class transporters only have about eight or nine crew total... while the Ikazuchi-class probably tops out around 200 counting its air wing, and the Izumo (at only about the size of one Zentradi scoutship) probably only has around 300-400 people aboard in total. Most of the actual soldiery were deployed aboard the Horizont descent shuttles, which held a crew of something like eight and then maybe thirty or so infantry. They were fighting on, at best, about company scale... which is more or less in keeping with the dialog, where 1st Lt. Bernard identifies himself as belonging to the 21st Battle Company.

Seto wrote:Running MOSPEADA with the RTSC core book, New Generation, and Genesis Pits would require scrapping the majority of the latter two books, tossing everything Haydonite related, the Invid Overlord, Bioroid interceptor, etc.; tossing the specs for the fighters, revising the weapons, and a whole bunch of other stuff besides to get in into something vaguely resembling parity with the original MOSPEADA setting. Southern Cross... might actually be the easiest, since its tech specs are so vague and thin on the ground that about all you'd need to do to make it fit is replace the Spartas' main mount with a laser (no particle knockback, no solid shells), scrap the Myrmidon, and then relabel any "powered armor" into regular ~6m tall walkers.

Some of this is what I would consider fine-tuning to taste (game stats reflect series better, though this does not need to be done), the RT-only aspects would be covered in adjusting for the setting differences (most of which would be centered in fluff/availability) that really don't need to be written down/out IF players/GM are familiar with the setting from other sources.

Seto wrote:Except that the narrator and Commander Leonard explicitly rule it out... and even the RPG agrees, before we go mincing words, that the term "Zentradi holocaust" refers to the bombardment itself.

Actually the narrator makes conflicting statements between two episodes (one vague, one more specific) concerning survivors, which may come down to context the dialogue was given and the type of narrator RT actually has. Even Leonard's statement is subject to context, it was a speech after all (so could have varying degrees of truth), and it was directed at a specific audience and not globally.

There is also a disconnect between the population later arcs and end of TMS, so 70k can not be the only survivors based on the available information since in 33years they recover to have a population in the millions (plus off-word, per dialogue in TSC, even w/o TSC though it does appear the population has to be bigger to support what we see). The main problem is we don't know where the others people come from in-universe, either there are other survivor locations beyond the SDF-1 (doesn't make the narrator wrong, but does mean he isn't omniscient), the Zentraedi/Tirolians integrated successfully to be considered human and not stand out, or some type of artificial population was created (cloning).

Seto wrote:The Grand Cannon was in pretty rough shape even beforehand, as its own status reports indicate... and that was far and away the deepest bunker available on the planet. The series version of events also makes the Grand Cannon THE Grand Cannon, with no indication of other, similar installations the way the RPG claims... though that may be, in part or in full, because Leonard nuked the other one a few years before.

The Grand Cannon though had numerous survivors from the bombardment itself. Which means other facilities could also survive (especially if they don't draw attention to themselves like Alaska Base did). We know 5% of the surface escaped devastation, and as New York City's iconic landmarks show, one does not need to be buried as deep to survive intact, which means millions could have survived in NYC alone.

Long term sustainability is an issue by this point, but not impossible (especially with relocation and survivors helping each other, as the SDF-1's military is said to do). Really without the SDF-1 and its 70k people and technology, it is possible the other survivors would not have survived (or as well with technology they had available).

Let us also keep in mind just how many people survived the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts. That was a fair number and even though those blasts are not anywhere near the level of the Zentraedi Reflex cannons, it does show people could have survived and done so relatively close to the actual impact points. Could they live beyond that? It is plausible as has been shown by the fact people, again, survived relatively close to the two blasts I already mentioned.

Also as was shown near Chernobyl, radiation levels there are already well below where they thought they would be, the local wild life and vegetation have recovered quite well and it isn't anywhere near the wasteland it was thought it would turn into. Earth is a lot hardier than we give her credit for.

assuming that leanord was telling the truth is abit fool hardy. seeing how he blew up the southern grand cannon, and he developed inferior mecha deliberately: he has proved that the defense of earth is less his priority, and having accolades for himself is more his priority. since when do politicans and generals tell the truth?

Actually, only the RPG makes those mecha "inferior". There is no in show proof the mecha were inferior by any means. Also inferior is a matter of how? Battloids were definitely more mobile and agile than Destroids so in that regard they are superior. I would take a Hovertank over a Destroid (at least in Robotech anyway though not in Macross proper)

I emailed Steve Yun, and The only Comics to be Canon in the Robotech world are the Prelude ones. The other Lines are simply stories set in the universe, and are not completely canon... if the new comics were to be all considered canon, the Lion-Team takes out Breetia pretty early in the Robotech conflict...

Wouldn't that make the ability for the YF-4 to transform only conjecture then as that comic wouldn't be canon since it was not Prelude? Wouldn't that also make Leonard's and Edwards being Anti-UL only conjecture as well not to mention teh destruction of hte South American Grand Cannon?

Those stories all have elements of truth. But can't be taken as over writing the 85series episodes or to affect later series or stories.
The vf-x-4 from the show may not transform. But the yf-4 from rrt transforms.

jaymz wrote:Let us also keep in mind just how many people survived the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts.

Those were relatively low-yield compared to what we actually see in the series... they didn't freaking EVAPORATE towns and leave craters hundreds of meters deep.

sirkermittsg wrote:assuming that leanord was telling the truth is abit fool hardy.

At that point, according to Harmony Gold's official take and the RPG, Leonard is effectively the supreme authority on Earth... leaving him very little reason to lie or distort the truth, though he IS backed up by the narrator as well.

jaymz wrote:Actually, only the RPG makes those mecha "inferior".

Their official spec makes them inferior too... but that's mainly a function of Harmony Gold having copied from the OSM, in which Macross's weaponry and armor and the like are an order of magnitude or more (quite literally) ahead of what's being fielded in the other two shows in terms of potency. Robotech is, based on what little objective data exists in RTSC's coverage, biased more towards the MOSPEADA and Gundam side of capability... where a megawatt in beam weaponry means something and guns generally haven't advanced much above what we have today.

jaymz wrote:Battloids were definitely more mobile and agile than Destroids so in that regard they are superior. I would take a Hovertank over a Destroid (at least in Robotech anyway though not in Macross proper)

Not really, there are several scenes in Macross that show that the Tomahawk and other Series 04 designs are pretty spry.

jaymz wrote:Wouldn't that make the ability for the YF-4 to transform only conjecture then as that comic wouldn't be canon since it was not Prelude? Wouldn't that also make Leonard's and Edwards being Anti-UL only conjecture as well not to mention teh destruction of hte South American Grand Cannon?

If the answer he got is actually what Steve wrote, it sounds like Steve fobbed him off with the usual non-answer in that Harmony Gold considers all other official works to be of inferior standing to the series. Tommy Yune and Kevin McKeever have both gone on record saying that the new comics are canon at various points. I could take 'em or leave 'em, those comics aren't that great and don't really add much to anything. Either way, it hardly affects the population or anything else relevant to the subject matter of the thread... all it really changes is exactly how much of Earth's suffering Leonard was directly responsible for. If they are, then Leonard is responsible for two near-misses with extinction thanks to his terrorist origins and bad leadership. If they aren't, then Leonard's only responsible for one significant near-miss with extinction due to bad leadership and xenophobia. It doesn't really affect anything else.

His OSM version, Claude Leon, might've been a better person to work for even if he did still lose... but at least then there's less complexity in the military, which makes things easier on the player.

I did point out that the blasts I mention are lower in yield and did specify that outside the impact (ie the vapourized town) that they could have survived. Not that they did but it is plausible depending on the scenario.

LLA has already shown that the comics are not held as canon as the same scenes of the tiger from the comics were animated as REF monsters

After seeing it, it looks like they aren't quite REF monster either though......not quite. They look like they are firing two arm cannons and one "back"mounted cannon.

if lenoard was a part of the AUL, then why the frick did they bring him on as the leader of the ASC? he blew up a facility that would have been one of the major parts of earths defenses and cost millions of lives in the first robotech war. He should have been arrested and hung.

sirkermittsg wrote:if lenoard was a part of the AUL, then why the frick did they bring him on as the leader of the ASC? he blew up a facility that would have been one of the major parts of earths defenses and cost millions of lives in the first robotech war. He should have been arrested and hung.

that's why those comics are not canon in all aspects. The same guy who built the destroids is aul? Sounds unlikely. And stupid.

jaymz wrote:After seeing it, it looks like they aren't quite REF monster either though......not quite. They look like they are firing two arm cannons and one "back"mounted cannon.

they aren't tigers. Closet mecha is the REF Mac in design... could simply be the new canon version of the old design. Still shows the comics are not solid canon.

OIhj agreed, I was just saying they aren't QUITE the REF Monster we know of.

sirkermittsg wrote:if lenoard was a part of the AUL, then why the frick did they bring him on as the leader of the ASC? he blew up a facility that would have been one of the major parts of earths defenses and cost millions of lives in the first robotech war. He should have been arrested and hung.

I believe it was to get his troops and hardware, since he built quite a nice army in south america. If I remember correctly. But as it has beed stated, it was a stuppid plot arc.

sirkermittsg wrote:if lenoard was a part of the AUL, then why the frick did they bring him on as the leader of the ASC? [...]

Because he did a good enough job of covering his arse while sabotaging the UEG's VF-1 programme and orchestrating the hijacking of ARMD-01 in a story made mostly of bits and pieces combined from different parts of the Macross OSM that nobody caught him. The only one who knew, as far as we know, is T.R. Edwards, who was his minion and also not exactly fond of the UEG's new authority figures after the first war ended. (His massive hate for Rick Hunter being well documented.)

Remember, in the Robotech version of events they had VERY few people to work with and apparently weren't exactly comfortable with allowing Zentradi to serve in positions of military authority after the war like they did in Macross. In terms of surviving senior officers, there don't appear to have been more than a handful, and Leonard seems to have gotten the job in the series version of events by being the least beloved (or most openly critical) of the Pioneer expedition and the Hunter administration. (Which goes to show that, while he might've been a treasonous arse and a bad boss, he was at least a halfway decent judge of character.) The Macross version put a lot of senior Zentradi in positions of authority, like Britai Kridanik (Commander of the UN Spacy from 2016 on), Exesedol Folmo, Naresuan, Richard Bilra, Algus Selza, Timoshie Daldhanton...

and given his position, it may have been less "Leonard was part of the AUL" and more "that cell of the AUL belonged to Leonard".. Leonard might have been arranging things on behalf of part the UEG to not only fast track specific projects (like the Destroid program) but also to help create an atmosphere of fear the UEG could exploit on earth. (especially since they seem to have been hiding just how dangerous the threat of alien invasion was)

Leonard thus being a kind of 'double agent'.. who faked a conversion to the AUL in order to gain a measure of control over it.

jaymz wrote:Actually, only the RPG makes those mecha "inferior". There is no in show proof the mecha were inferior by any means. Also inferior is a matter of how?

I agree that there is no in-show proof the mecha were inferior. And if we go off the visual record and making counts based on it, it wouldn't add up to what TBTB (HG/PB as case maybe) w/o a lot of "off screen" stuff w/o support from on-screen dialogue.

And I'm not even sure the RPG (or HG's take) makes them out to be "inferior" either. They do seem to be trading aspects in various areas and emphasis, so it is possible using a few metrics to get an "inferiority" feel, but in an overall setup that is actually lacking.

Seto wrote:At that point, according to Harmony Gold's official take and the RPG, Leonard is effectively the supreme authority on Earth... leaving him very little reason to lie or distort the truth, though he IS backed up by the narrator as well.

As for the narrator, it comes down to what type of narrator he is supposed to be (which may change from episode to episode), since narrators are not always omnicent.

Why wouldn't Leonard have a reason to lie or distort the truth? Especially sense he can be shown to do that at times, so it can't be ruled out that he is in fact being less than 100% truthful.

There are examples that would seem to show Leonard is willing to avoid the truth w/n the 85ep:
-"Danger Zone", Leonard DOES NOT WANT TO EXPLAIN the loss of an entire sector
-"Metal Fire", at the end having the kidnapped citizens listed as casualties fo the battle (KIA)
-Leonard is contacted in private by the Masters, BUT later doesn't mention/correct an individual in a staff meeting about them not making communication attempt. Granted the incident is more one-way, but it does show the aliens communicating with humans and he doesn't mention it (lie/distort). I do not recall the exact episode for the staff meeting, but the Comm. was from "Star Dust", so it could be a multi-episode arc.

We can add the OVA for Sentienls and the "Pigeon" Reference to show that he is willing to distort the truth.

sirkermittsg wrote:if lenoard was a part of the AUL, then why the frick did they bring him on as the leader of the ASC? he blew up a facility that would have been one of the major parts of earths defenses and cost millions of lives in the first robotech war. He should have been arrested and hung.

Unknown. It is possible Leonard's involvement with the group was unknown to the UEDF: RDF. With the R.o.D, there might be no AUL to return too and records concerning them may not have survived the event itself (pointing towards lots of people able to get a "fresh start" much easier than they do today).

Leonard is the guy responsible/involved the ASC's formation in a few takes on the origin of the group (2E RPG, Novels, old-comics) that I'm familar with, so it is only natural that he would be the leader of it.

ShadowLogan wrote:As for the narrator, it comes down to what type of narrator he is supposed to be (which may change from episode to episode), since narrators are not always omnicent.

Thus far, there is no cogent reason to ignore the narrator when his dialogue lines up perfectly in this case...

ShadowLogan wrote:Why wouldn't Leonard have a reason to lie or distort the truth? Especially sense he can be shown to do that at times, so it can't be ruled out that he is in fact being less than 100% truthful.

Your examples, though meticulously researched, are all from wartime... Leonard's speech was given in peacetime, and he would have little motivation to lie when pretty much everybody and their dog ought to know how many people survived the Zentradi holocaust, since EVERYONE present was a survivor or descendant thereof.

As far as his line in Sentinels goes, hyperbole isn't really deceit... he's trying to make a point, and frankly the Masters Saga's events do rather bear out the substance of his complaint. Namely, that he wasn't able to effectively defend Earth with the resources he had after the Pioneer Mission pinched all the best toys. So... that's more an example of prescient honesty than anything.

Anyway, in the other cases... they can easily be chalked up to reasons of maintaining public and military morale during wartime, not causing a panic among civilians, or various minions not having a high enough security clearance to discuss various matters.

Still... we're drifting further off-topic again.




I had a bit of free time the other day waiting for a teleconference, and spent some time musing with a friend on how exactly the game universe of an OSM-derived RPG would differ from the Robotech one. The key point we kept coming back to was, apart from fluff-related matters like chronology and backstory, the capabilities of humanity's weapons.

Humanity's weapons technology in MOSPEADA, from which Harmony Gold has apparently decided to scale Robotech's own technology, is little better than what's available today. Mars Colony's forces use laser and particle beam weapons like the Mars Gallant/H90 Laser Hound and the various small-to-mid bore particle beam weapons used by the VR-052 series Ride Armors, but apart from ammo capacity they aren't really much better than modern firearms. Excluding the Gallant/H90, the laser small arms used by Mars Colony don't even offer an advantage in ammo capacity. Stick's laser submachine pistol only had the regular 18-shot or large 36-shot magazine, and the most capacious magazine beyond that was the FAL-2's stock magazine which held 100 shots but was hard to detach in the field. The weapons on the mecha are in a similar boat, with the best guns being 30mm rotary cannons on the TLEAD or the single 80mm beam rifle on the Legioss... neither of which really exceed modern attack plane levels of actual firepower. Their best, most advanced weapons system (the synchrotron cannon) is nothing more than a massive particle accelerator. For the most part, MOSPEADA is actually a SDC setting, in practical terms.

It's harder to gauge Southern Cross, mainly due to the profound lack of information left behind by its creators after it was canned, but weapons tech in that universe seems to lag a bit behind what the MOSPEADA setting has, despite being set 40 years further into the future. Humanity's only got a love affair with laser weapons of various types in that setting, and doesn't appear to possess particle beam cannon technology. The only variance seems to be whether the laser is pulsed or a continuous beam type. Whether this is because humanity just can't do better, or because their recent near-miss with extinction at the hands of overkill-grade weaponry knocked a little sense into them, I cannot say, but their laser weapons don't seem to be more than about megawatt scale.

Macross is understandably a bit off the hook, since humanity in that version of events ended up having technology a few thousand years ahead of their own summarily dropped in their laps. They've found themselves with a world where the average rotary cannon carried by a Valkyrie has around ten times the stopping power of the A-10A's 30mm cannon, and a 5 megawatt-plus laser machine gun or particle beam gun is considered a light coaxial weapon at best. It's not entirely surprising, since the setting also includes anti-beam coating technology, and energy-based armor reinforcement. It's still taken up to eleven by the fact that, in order to be considered main offensive-weapon grade, a beam cannon needs to be anywhere from a few dozen megawatts a shot to a few hundred. Then there's always Dimension weapons, which are a fold technology-based, fully-scalable, fallout-free, infinite-ammo version of the nuclear bazooka from Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory, and those come in every size from anti-fleet installations capable of wiping out three-quarters of a million ships at a go to coaxial guns on the heads of Valkyries, and every size inbetween. The converging beam rifles that're just coming into vogue in the late 2050s in Macross's main timeline are, based on the evidence provided, probably well into the hundreds or thousands of megawatts. (Some of them actually need four reaction engines or an external, dedicated reactor just to operate.)

Seto wrote:Thus far, there is no cogent reason to ignore the narrator when his dialogue lines up perfectly in this case...

I never said to ignore the narrator, but depending on the type of narrator Robotech actually has it is possible for said narrator to be wrong in what gets reported. So it is very important to determine what type of narrator one is actually dealing with, one who is infallible vs one that is fallible (even though this is a 3rd Person Narrator, that does not automatically make them infallible).

The narrator tells us that Lisa volunteered for the Cat's Eye mission, even though Gloval is heard to order her one the mission. Even Ariel/Marlene's placement is said to be careful, even though it shows her bouncing around and dropped (when the carrying case cracks). So the narrator can be shown to be fallible, which means other statements he makes may also be not be infallible.

http://academic.reed.edu/english/course ... rator.html

Seto wrote:Your examples, though meticulously researched, are all from wartime... Leonard's speech was given in peacetime, and he would have little motivation to lie when pretty much everybody and their dog ought to know how many people survived the Zentradi holocaust, since EVERYONE present was a survivor or descendant thereof.

Doesn't matter that it was wartime or peacetime, it establishes that Leonard can be shown to be less than 100% truthful in his statements. The 3 incidents in 85ep does not appear to fit the bill of one trying to keep morale up, 2 of them out right involved people that had a reason to know the truth (and ONE WAS HIS APPARENT BOSS), and the 3rd could have classified the OFFICIAL REPORT of the Battle, but had a different public statement done to keep morale up (see something similar done in TMS).

Leonard's statement may not be entirely factual though, as the Sen. OVA shows he does engage in hyperbole w/the Pigeons (I put it at 99% chance that it was hyperbole, that 1% I do not rule out that there could be some alien/mutant "pigeon" menace requiring large military force to deal with given the setting). The 70k survivors may have been the "CORE" survivor group, much like the 300 Spartans where the CORE of the Greek forces that fought the Persians at Thermopylae, but people may portray/think of it as only the 300 Spartans and neglecting the other Greek City-States that sent forces with them.

Seto wrote:Still... we're drifting further off-topic again.

Agree.

I do think Robotech should be an SDC setting, but that is not something that one has to do to fine-tune it for OSM setting use. Even if one wanted to convert to an SDC setting, there is the quick method that Rifts Conversion book suggest for their setting, the main hic-up though is determining AR (and if one uses them PV) value (which are done as a range value for a given type, so two people could convert it and have entirely different values). Makes just using MDC easier as everything is ready out of the box (not that people can't fine tune stats to their liking).

ShadowLogan wrote:I do think Robotech should be an SDC setting, but that is not something that one has to do to fine-tune it for OSM setting use. Even if one wanted to convert to an SDC setting, there is the quick method that Rifts Conversion book suggest for their setting, the main hic-up though is determining AR (and if one uses them PV) value (which are done as a range value for a given type, so two people could convert it and have entirely different values).

Given that one of the key definitions of the Mega-Damage system is that it's the kind of damage that will absolutely wreck an automobile or reduce a conventionally-armored individual to a fine drizzle of tomato juice, I really think converting 'em to SDC is entirely merited to fit the actual substance of the originals. Except for the 30mm rotary cannons on the TLEAD and maybe the 80mm beam rifle, MOSPEADA doesn't bring anything to the table that isn't rudely equivalent in performance to what we have in military-grade small arms today. Unless we've promoted the M1911 to mega-damage status...

Well, one could always go halfway and adopt my (somewhat controversial, apparently) stance that there's no such thing as a man-portable mega-damage weapon.

ShadowLogan wrote:Makes just using MDC easier as everything is ready out of the box (not that people can't fine tune stats to their liking).

Maybe so... but the only one of the original three that is actually a mega-damage setting is Macross, where one can see planes crash through reinforced concrete buildings at terminal velocity without so much as a scratch, and it takes the kind of firepower that would shred a tank like tinfoil to tangibly menace a mecha.

ShadowLogan wrote:
I do think Robotech should be an SDC setting, but that is not something that one has to do to fine-tune it for OSM setting use. Even if one wanted to convert to an SDC setting, there is the quick method that Rifts Conversion book suggest for their setting, the main hic-up though is determining AR (and if one uses them PV) value (which are done as a range value for a given type, so two people could convert it and have entirely different values). Makes just using MDC easier as everything is ready out of the box (not that people can't fine tune stats to their liking).

I know the 1st era of Robotech should be SDC setting, the only MDC Object in the show would be the SDF-1 and the Zent Cap ships... The tin-foil VF-1's and the paper-armor Battlepods blow up more easily that any thing else in the Series, the Vf-1 Requiring Teams and Teams of Techs to keep them in the air, and Rick constantly talking about how many they lose in each engagement with the Zents.
The only time the Vf-1 is shown to survive any impact is in the first episodes when the Main Characters plot armor protects him as he crashed through a few Civilian buildings... his same plot armor allows him to survive a few minutes in hard vacuum in a helmet and scarf... The Middle Chapter would be the humans first MD mecha and the first enemy MD mecha.... the Invid would vary between MDC and SDC mecha, as the Scout is taken down by small arms fire, but it takes a Syncro-Canon or Beta to take down a Commander...

Seto wrote:Given that one of the key definitions of the Mega-Damage system is that it's the kind of damage that will absolutely wreck an automobile or reduce a conventionally-armored individual to a fine drizzle of tomato juice, I really think converting 'em to SDC is entirely merited to fit the actual substance of the originals. Except for the 30mm rotary cannons on the TLEAD and maybe the 80mm beam rifle, MOSPEADA doesn't bring anything to the table that isn't rudely equivalent in performance to what we have in military-grade small arms today. Unless we've promoted the M1911 to mega-damage status...

Well, one could always go halfway and adopt my (somewhat controversial, apparently) stance that there's no such thing as a man-portable mega-damage weapon.

The problem is one can do that with lots of SDC damage to, plus MDC weapons have an attribute to IGNORE A.R. While the first aspect is pretty easy to duplicate (look up the old Heavy Weapons in 1E main book, they could be used to do both examples of MD), the second is not unless one brings in Penetration Value (PV), which IINM is not commonly used in SDC settings (at least those I'm familiar w/ and I only know about it because it appears "partially" in one setting likely due to a bad cut-paste job).

An M1911 could be made to do MD, if one puts the right type of round in to it, at least by examples available. To illustrate look at some of the projectile rifles in 2E, depending on the type of round they carry they can do straight MD or SDC (even pistol). And if one expands to other MDC-lines, there are at least 3 more that I can think of in Rifts alone (though one or two might qualify as low-quality RT versions by another name, one will be good for 1 shot).

ShadowLogan wrote:The problem is one can do that with lots of SDC damage to, plus MDC weapons have an attribute to IGNORE A.R.

Yes, but that's the whole point, isn't it? An enterprising soul can, if they so choose, destroy a car or other SDC-type vehicle by spraying it with rounds from a SD weapon until it goes to pieces, while the typical MD weapon will reduce the SDC-type vehicle to a spray of shrapnel and liquidized crew with a well placed shot or two. That fits pretty well with reality. You COULD reduce a car to a wreck via a rifle firing NATO 5.56mm rounds, but it'd take you a while and a lot of bullets to do it. Or there's the option to call in something that's preposterously overkill and shred the car with a single shot/burst of fire... something like a main battle tank's cannon or the GAU-8/A rotary cannon on an A-10.

That is, supposedly, the difference between a SD weapon and a MD weapon... you use a SD weapon when you want to kill a hard-armored trooper, and you use a MD weapon when you want to paint the landscape with liquidized gropo.

Apart from super-heavy anti-materiel rifles designed for attacking main battle tanks and other stuff like armored, bomb-proof bunkers - the kind of rifle where firing it gives you better than even chances of a broken collarbone or rib for your trouble - you don't really see something that could arguably be called mega-damage in man-portable weaponry. Robotech's biased itself towards the MOSPEADA take on man-portable weaponry, and that stuff is little better than what we have today in terms of its actual stopping power, unless one wants to posit the existence of mega-damage shrubbery on Earth's surface.

MOSPEADA's setting was, by its original intent before its toy partner-slash-sponsor got to looking at the Macross toy sales, originally meant to be about armored infantry fighting the Inbit. So, as the natural result, the Inbit go down fairly easily to what amounts to a short-form equivalent of a light anti-materiel rifle (the 40mm or 60mm beam weapons on the VR-052) or an anti-tank rocket. That's a setting that's pretty unarguably SDC-oriented.

Southern Cross was harder to gauge, mostly because of the lack of hard information than there being any uncertainty in the animation itself. Like MOSPEADA before it, Southern Cross is biased towards the Gundam end of the mecha-performance spectrum for the mecha used by the Southern Cross Army. Man-portable energy weapons are common, but again they don't seem to have destructive capabilities much beyond what we have today. Even so, we see on at least one occasion that it's possible to down a Bioroid with carefully-aimed fire from a medium-heavy infantry rifle. That, combined with the relatively low-tech state of humanity's weaponry (lasers being the pinnacle of the Southern Cross Army's weaponry), point to a SDC-oriented setting.

Macross, by contrast, is pretty unarguably a MDC-oriented setting. It's not just Valkyries which have armor that'll let 'em crash through reinforced concrete buildings at speed like it's nothing, mecha which are generally perceived as being armored with sugar wafers and wishful thinking are shown with the durability to smash their way through buildings without suffering any damage. Energy weapons in Macross are considered light if they have only five times the firepower of the Legioss's gun pods from MOSPEADA, and you don't really get into "heavy" territory with them until you're looking at hundreds of megawatts a shot. More traditional weapons like machine guns or rotary cannons are on levels way above what's available today... the GU-11's lobbing 55mm AP rounds downrange at around twice the speed of the A-10's GAU-8/A, and subsequent models only improved on that (finally topping out around 7.5km/s for muzzle velocity in the most recent titles). That's a setting where nothing the infantry has is going to even scratch a mecha, and indeed infantry itself has taken a backseat to 'em until very recently, when they finally got their hands on something nasty enough to hurt the Zentradi outside of their mecha (the linear rifles on the EX-Gear).

Seto Kaiba wrote:Macross, by contrast, is pretty unarguably a MDC-oriented setting. It's not just Valkyries which have armor that'll let 'em crash through reinforced concrete buildings at speed like it's nothing, mecha which are generally perceived as being armored with sugar wafers and wishful thinking are shown with the durability to smash their way through buildings without suffering any damage.

Yes, cause god knows we don't see a Spartas catch a Logan that is falling out of control without both being reduced to slag. Nor do we see Bioroids doing 'Death from Above' onto mecha several stories below without so much as suffering a scratch. If you actually bothered to put up a rational argument that wasn't filled with inaccuracies it might be useful.

Rabid Southern Cross Fan wrote:Yes, cause god knows we don't see a Spartas catch a Logan that is falling out of control without both being reduced to slag. Nor do we see Bioroids doing 'Death from Above' onto mecha several stories below without so much as suffering a scratch.

Yes, we see (on one occasion) a Spartas catch a Logan that falls a short distance after losing control... and we see Bioroids jump onto other mecha on one or two occasions. The latter is not terribly surprising since the Zor Lords built the Bioroids to operate just like a flesh-and-blood body (in which the pilot is the brain in a very literal sense), so they can naturally absorb shock better in a controlled fall where they've got the time and opportunity to use their legs to cushion the impact. As far as fmr. Lieutenant Charles' lucky catch of a falling Logan... yes, neither mecha is destroyed, but neither mecha gets up again after it either, and the Logan's got a fair amount of damage from a low-speed collision (which also landed its pilot in the hospital).

It's rather difficult to argue that the Bioroids are well-armored when we see that even a lucky shot with an infantry rifle can take one down, and sometimes low-speed, low-altitude falls seem to disable 'em at least temporarily (such as in "Metal Fire"). The Spartas isn't all that much better either... we see on at least one occasion that a low-speed rollover accident is enough to apparently cause one to EXPLODE.

(Compare that to Macross, where crashing through a row of reinforced concrete buildings doesn't leave a scratch on you and plowing into the ground at several hundred kph is the sort of accident you can walk away from, or MOSPEADA, where falling out of orbit and making a semi-controlled crash earns little more than a few bumps and bruises.)

I'm not saying that the the mecha of Southern Cross are weak, per se... what I'm saying is that, both in arms and armor, they're much closer to modern technology and that of Gundam than the truly off-the-hook power levels in an undeniably mega-damage setting like Macross. That series would be, if one were to adapt the OSM into a stand-alone RPG, more of a SDC-oriented setting, due mainly to the fact that the technology available isn't that far advanced over what we have right now. In some ways, like the power and development of energy weapons, it's not even as advanced as the Universal Century of Gundam's multiverse. Lasers are still the energy weapon of choice, and the series doesn't really give the impression they're all that powerful.


EDIT: Admittedly, the Zor have a very, VERY good reason for using the same weapons technology as Glorie's human forces... the technology of the Zor is the same stuff the humans are using, just with a few centuries or millennia more development behind it thanks to temporal shenanigans.

Rabid Southern Cross Fan wrote:
Yes, cause god knows we don't see a Spartas catch a Logan that is falling out of control without both being reduced to slag. Nor do we see Bioroids doing 'Death from Above' onto mecha several stories below without so much as suffering a scratch.

Never do we see a Later-Era Mecha beat to slag with a metal Pipe either... for armors that "Magikally" withstand Billion of Megawatts of Lazor Blasts, the tin-foil VF-1 gets waster by a Pipe...
Plot Armor is a funny thing... The Same VF-1 piloted by Rick can Survive barrelying through a few structurally unsound SDC Civilian buildings... but blows up with the slightest glancing blow from a lazor when piloted by Bob "Red-Shirt" Mcguffin....
Let Bob fly his Vf-1 into a Building, the Medics would have to Id him from the few molar that survive the impact intact...
Even Roy's Plot Armor wore thin, and his blood soaked carcase didn't get the chance to choke on some pineapple salad...
for every instance one can show for how awesome a Mecha survives a blast of blow, I can show 50 times that it was done by Plot-armor, and that same blast would kill someone who isn't necessary to the Script...

Plot armour can be seen in all three eras.

jaymz wrote:Plot armour can be seen in all three eras.

True, but plot armor doesn't affect the actual basic technological setting of the individual shows... that only affects the fates of individual main characters when luck or good judgment saves them from what'd ordinarily be a lethal hit.

The facts are what they are... and, in all truth, the fact is that the creators of Southern Cross and MOSPEADA might've been trying to cash in on the success of Macross and its toy line, but for very solid, understandable reasons typically relating to the series chronology and/or the core concept of the series itself, they set the level of humanity's technological prowess much closer to that of Universal Century Gundam. (The usual, obvious reason being that in neither show did humanity have a huge technological leg-up from a crashed alien starship the way humans in Macross did.)

jaymz wrote:Plot armour can be seen in all three eras.

This Statement: "for every instance one can show for how awesome a Mecha survives a blast of blow, I can show 50 times that it was done by Plot-armor, and that same blast would kill someone who isn't necessary to the Script..." applies to every era.

the Main difference betweem the OSM setting and the Gestalt setting of Robotech is the Same tech that makes SDf-Macross MDC, is the beginning of Robotech... that same tech that makes Rick survive a plot-armor crash through SDC-buildings in an MD mecha... develops into the VHT that can shrug off Insane Damage and Evolved from the creators of the Bioroid... all whom developed this tech to Fight the Invid...

the Pluto-Devils in Macross Sevin might have made the protoculture technology that evolved into the Macrass, the guys using their Instrumecha do a good ob of defeating them.

This is how the Source Anime and Robotech is really different.
in SDC:SC the Humans invent their own FTL technology and Mecha systems, without the need of an Alien Invasion force to help them out.
Mospeda Takes player alomst 100 years in the Future of the time it was written... humanity in it should ahve tech on Par with Rifts golden-age if you want an in-game comparison...
Macross give the Humans the advantage of demon tech from the Proto-coulture/Devils.. making it silly in how powerful it is, to the point of near stupidity.

Seto wrote:(Compare that to Macross, where crashing through a row of reinforced concrete buildings doesn't leave a scratch on you and plowing into the ground at several hundred kph is the sort of accident you can walk away from, or MOSPEADA, where falling out of orbit and making a semi-controlled crash earns little more than a few bumps and bruises.)

Question is do we kneed MDC to explain it. The answer is NO: "Bunker Buster" bombs (I'm sure there are others) put that feat to shame.

Just because the VT-1D doesn't appear to have a scratches or dents on it from the landing, doesn't mean it did not pick any up.

Seto wrote: As far as fmr. Lieutenant Charles' lucky catch of a falling Logan... yes, neither mecha is destroyed, but neither mecha gets up again after it either, and the Logan's got a fair amount of damage from a low-speed collision (which also landed its pilot in the hospital).

Actually it would be fair to say that we don't see what happens to them after they come to a stop.

And I would not characterize the Logan to have suffered a fair amount of damage from the low speed collision, it's on par with the VT-1D in Ep1 taking damage and going into a dive, resulting in it smashing some buildings. Visually the Logan appears to be in better shape than the VT-1D if we count the bullet holes in the VT-1D, if we don't they are the same. The main difference from a pilot perspective is that Rick was much higher up, so had more time to recover from the spin (Roll axis) than Marie.

Both units in their recovery do have thrusters firing to help slow them down (VF-1's foot thrusters, VHT for the Logan).

Seto wrote:Yes, but that's the whole point, isn't it? An enterprising soul can, if they so choose, destroy a car or other SDC-type vehicle by spraying it with rounds from a SD weapon until it goes to pieces, while the typical MD weapon will reduce the SDC-type vehicle to a spray of shrapnel and liquidized crew with a well placed shot or two. That fits pretty well with reality. You COULD reduce a car to a wreck via a rifle firing NATO 5.56mm rounds, but it'd take you a while and a lot of bullets to do it. Or there's the option to call in something that's preposterously overkill and shred the car with a single shot/burst of fire... something like a main battle tank's cannon or the GAU-8/A rotary cannon on an A-10.

That things where made MD/MDC that shouldn't have been isn't in dispute. But there are advantages to just using the Palladium assignment of XYZ as ABC since it would also make crossovers easier, unless of course one wants to do all the MD to SD conversions. And crossovers don't have to be the generic X meets Y universe, I also include using it to fill in coverage gaps in equipment for the settings and/or for other factions to use with only minor changes (beyond fluff).

Examples:
-there are numerous naval ships in Rifts SB/WB that could be used in all 3 settings. As is, we have four naval ship types (2 SDF:M, 2 GCM). Pulling ships from those settings is possible.
-Dinosaurs appear in several Rifts books, so can be used to supplement the types stated in use by the Inbit in the Gen. Pits.
-Glorie can be given some additional bio-diversity
-ready made stuff for Space Pirates and other independent factions (GCM, SDC:SC, even SDF:M)
-additional hardware for the Cold Weather squad (SDC:SC), IIRC, and certainly space based forces can get some supplement hardware
-there is a Trax transformable sub-fighter (Rifts), that could easily be at home in SDF:M or SDC:SC for their naval forces based on visual design (more so SDF:M), there are a few more Variable mecha to that could be used to supplement force structure.
-there are armored vehicles one can use to drop in for GCM or SDC:SC for them to use, since they are pretty light in terms of conventional armored vehicle designs in the books

ShadowLogan wrote:Question is do we kneed MDC to explain it. The answer is NO: "Bunker Buster" bombs (I'm sure there are others) put that feat to shame.

When it comes to having a ridiculously sophisticated combat aircraft crashing into a reinforced concrete building and coming out the other side not just intact but pretty much entirely unscathed... yeah, that really does call for a MDC explanation. Bunker busters are one thing, they're designed to smash a nice, neat little hole into reinforced concrete... that's a whole lot different than haphazardly plowing a whole plane into same in an uncontrolled descent.

ShadowLogan wrote:Just because the VT-1D doesn't appear to have a scratches or dents on it from the landing, doesn't mean it did not pick any up.

Even in the closeups, the only damage we see is that inflicted by the Zentradi beam weapons fire... a problem that is remedied in pretty short order.

ShadowLogan wrote:Actually it would be fair to say that we don't see what happens to them after they come to a stop.

We see enough, I think... like debris flying off the Logan at the moment of impact, including damage to the cockpit and some crushing of the canopy. The Logan clearly didn't come out of it anything like as well as the VF-1D did.

ShadowLogan wrote:And I would not characterize the Logan to have suffered a fair amount of damage from the low speed collision, it's on par with the VT-1D in Ep1 taking damage and going into a dive, resulting in it smashing some buildings.

The Logan didn't suffer any actual engine damage or anything else... it brushed past a Biover so gently that the wing didn't even suffer major deformation, yet it resulted in a complete loss of control. On the other hand, the VF-1D was shot full of holes and suffered a complete loss of engine power. That's not the same thing by a long shot.

ShadowLogan wrote:Both units in their recovery do have thrusters firing to help slow them down (VF-1's foot thrusters, VHT for the Logan).

Eh? I'll go back and review the animation again later, but Marie doesn't transform at all in that scene (meaning the thrusters aren't exposed) and Hikaru crashed because he suffered an engine failure... so his weren't firing either.

ShadowLogan wrote:That things where made MD/MDC that shouldn't have been isn't in dispute. But there are advantages to just using the Palladium assignment of XYZ as ABC since it would also make crossovers easier, unless of course one wants to do all the MD to SD conversions. And crossovers don't have to be the generic X meets Y universe, I also include using it to fill in coverage gaps in equipment for the settings and/or for other factions to use with only minor changes (beyond fluff).

Yeah, but if you're adapting these games to their OSM origins, you're gonna be writing enough new stuff already that you won't really have to worry about that...

Seto wrote:Bunker busters are one thing, they're designed to smash a nice, neat little hole into reinforced concrete... that's a whole lot different than haphazardly plowing a whole plane into same in an uncontrolled descent.

The point though is that one can design and build something from an SDC POV that can do the same thing.

Seto wrote:Even in the closeups, the only damage we see is that inflicted by the Zentradi beam weapons fire... a problem that is remedied in pretty short order.

Are any of the shots closeup enough to spot millimeter or microscopic level damage?

Seto wrote:We see enough, I think... like debris flying off the Logan at the moment of impact, including damage to the cockpit and some crushing of the canopy. The Logan clearly didn't come out of it anything like as well as the VF-1D did.

There's smoke, but that doesn't last very long. There is NO sign of damage to the cockpit, and the visuals after the VHT stops the Logan doesn't show any damage elsewhere either, indicating any debris one sees may be from the Hoversled. It really does look like the Logan comes out in better shape than the VF-1.

The Logan's movements resulting from the collision likely can be explained in a number of ways.

Seto wrote:Eh? I'll go back and review the animation again later, but Marie doesn't transform at all in that scene (meaning the thrusters aren't exposed) and Hikaru crashed because he suffered an engine failure... so his weren't firing either.

Thrusters that slowed the fall for Marie did not come from the Logan, but from Sean's VHT after the catch which was noted previously.

Seto wrote:Yeah, but if you're adapting these games to their OSM origins, you're gonna be writing enough new stuff already that you won't really have to worry about that...

[/quote]
I disagree. Not everyone is going to take the time to re-write stuff, or feel comfortable arriving at values and even then would likely want some frame of reference.

IMHO we've had MDC constructs and weapons in action for at least a century, possibly closer to two. So all the settings can be considered MDC easily.

[mod voice]Also, let's not get into era wars and series wars.[/mod voice]

ShadowLogan wrote:The point though is that one can design and build something from an SDC POV that can do the same thing.

I know, and I'm not saying you're wrong in that... I'm just saying there's a difference in the actual level of mechanical durability required to have a whole aircraft pass through a row of concrete buildings from having a bomb pass through one, maybe two layers of concrete merely intact enough to detonate.

ShadowLogan wrote:Are any of the shots closeup enough to spot millimeter or microscopic level damage?

There are a couple where you could argue that millimeter-level damage would be visible...

ShadowLogan wrote:There's smoke, but that doesn't last very long. There is NO sign of damage to the cockpit, and the visuals after the VHT stops the Logan doesn't show any damage elsewhere either, indicating any debris one sees may be from the Hoversled. It really does look like the Logan comes out in better shape than the VF-1.

Eh... I'm afraid you're incorrect. You may want to review the episode "Stardust" for the relevant scene in the second half. I've reviewed the footage in the ADV Films remastered edition of Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, and there IS some evident wing deformation on Marie's Logan at time index 00:20:03 in the episode. Likewise, we DO see debris fly off the Logan at time index 00:20:11, when its fall is arrested by Charles' hover tank. The deformation of the right wing is at its most visible at index 00:20:12, just before the two pass off the right side of the frame, and we clearly see there is cockpit damage at time index 00:20:15... the forward fuselage shows some evidence of deformation where it'd struck the Spartas' armor along the nose on the port side, and the canopy has several visible cracks in the front, which probably account for the spray of canopy-colored shrapnel we see when Charles first makes the catch.

The Spartas doesn't show any visible damage... but then, any damaged areas that would have been damaged by the collision are obscured by the mass of the fallen Logan that inflicted them.

That's a pretty clear indication of what I'm talking about... which is not terribly surprising. The tech setting of Southern Cross does not provide for materials quite as over-the-top durable as what was presented in Macross, for the obvious reason that humanity in that universe didn't get the 2,000+ year leg-up in material sciences overnight.

ShadowLogan wrote:Thrusters that slowed the fall for Marie did not come from the Logan, but from Sean's VHT after the catch which was noted previously.

True, though my remark that Hikaru's fall was NOT arrested by thrusters is also true.