But it's just a lame, Space Adventures Astro Plan-level ripoff fusion of Macross and Gundam anyway. Still, I know there's at least a couple of other Mekton gearheads who frequent these boards and most of this is actually a framing scene, so here goes:
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A secure meeting room, The Pentagon, Washington DC, 200x
"So some of the aliens are giants, so what?"
"So, despite being giants, aside form some very minor differences that we think are actually engineered adaptations - they can avoid poisoning from certain metals, chromium, strontium, a few others, by concentrating them in their hair follicles for example - these 'aliens' are human. Both the giants, and the normal sized ones."
"That's ridiculous. You'll be telling me they want to steal earth's women next."
"Ridculous? Maybe, but I'll tell you this - one of the females wasn't dead so long that we couldn't get viable ova samples from her body. After the other tests showed human genetics, they fertilised some with samples from a human."
"Are you seriously telling me there's alien halfbreeds growing in a lab somewhere? I didn't join the service to get wrapped up in a bad science fiction plot."
"No, of course not. The embryos were never implanted, and the one that was allowed to progress until a synthetic culture medium couldn't support it barely got to the size of a grain of sand before the cells died. It's just final proof that biologically speaking, they'rre human in every important way. But that's not the real important factor, it's that most of the bodies were big enoguh that with human proportions their bodies should have collapsed under their own mass, espescially since the onboard gravity was slightly higher than Earth-normal, if only by a few tencths of a percent."
"Again, so what? They have some kind of magic to break the laws of physics?"
"If you know science fiction, you'll know the adage that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. It seems that somewhere out there is an apparently human civilization that is sufficiently advanced."
"My nephew reads that crap, not me. I'm a practical man, Hudson. What's the bottom line that justifies spending millions on some boondoggle walking machines that as an old tank gunner I say would make lovely artillery targets and terrible armor profiles."
"Somehow, the giants' flesh is tougher than aluminum but still flexible when they want to move, and the only artificial structures we could find in the bodies was a nano-grown nervous system overlay to keep their reflex times to scale rather than relying on normal neurochemistry. We don't know how that worked, but we do know that someow, their humanoid war machines turn the pilot into some kind of quantum energy state, then reinforce their own structure just as much while hosting it. What's more, we got a volunteer to do it with one of the functional units. He came out of it as a giant after the first test, then switched at random several times through subsequent tests."
"I said bottom line, not more details. What's that all mean?"
"While the the war machine had a pilot, nothing smaller than a 105mm artillery shell could damage it. You could fire your old tank's gun at it all day and not even scrath the paint, General. We don't know why it works, but we have some idea how. A duplicate unit already exists in the lab, but there was a problem we didn't expect. We didn't have it connected to anything but test equipment. It's a good thing we used monkeys for test subjects instead of volunterers, they all came out catatonic, or at best showing signs of severe autism - until we mounted it in an articulated humanoid frame. Then, the clumsy hydraulics displayed much finer control than with an external operator and phsychological damage vanished. The bottom line? Any machine with one of these energy-state control cores is a superweapon, and only a machine shaped generally like the merged pilot can use one. That's why we need to spend millions on walking battle machines. Otherwise, we'd be helpless against them."
"I still don't like it, but I'll accept that for the sake of argument. Fine, there's humans flying around in space with super robots we'd have to go nuclear to stop. Far from ideal, and some kind of defense is obviously going to be neccessary, but what makes you so sure that they're going to be hostile? If they really aee human, at least some will be of course, but do we haver any evidence? Please don't tell me this is where the saucer nut stuff like crop circles and cattle mutilation comes in."
"No... if what we've extracted from the ship's computers is accurate, they don't bother with that kind of thing."
"Well that's a relief, at least -"
"-they go straight to orbital bombardment with megaton asteroids to suppres any native civilisation, then bring in processing ships the size of England to strip mine the planet's biological and mineral rescources right down to the point where the rock gets to be too soft and semi-molten to support large equipment, draining off the oceans along the way to fill the envirnonmental systems of the new ships that get built with the result. Then the ships get populated with a new crew, and set out to repeat the cycle."
"... That's not the kind of denial I wanted to hear, Hudson."
"I know, sir. It's not the kind of report I wanted to give."
"We don't always get what we want, do we, Hudson?"
"No sir."
"But it looks like this time, we're going to have to find the funding to get what we need. Alright, you have my support when you present this to the Joint Chiefs on Monday. The Air Force is going to balk, when they just barely got delivery on the F-22 in deployable numbers, but with my say so there should be at elast enough weight to get a Presidential review of this material as well, and I know Jack - he won't sit on this or dither around."
"I hope not, sir. I happen to like the continents the way they're currently arranged, and at least a few of the people living on them."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Game Start Time is around 20 years later, when the next alien ship shows up. They fight a few initial skirmishes because they recognise the tech-base, but are bewildered by the lack of a defense fleet eyond a few hundred cutters and even more by the lack of planetary harvesting going on, most of all by signs of a civilian population on the surface. Spies get sent down to try to figure out what in the galaxy is going on.... this is a different, altogether less rapacious, bunch of Homo Sapiens Xenoterrene. There may have been a small skirmish or two with scout ships like the first that crashed in the meantime, to keep governemtn interest focussed, or maybe the defenses are even more crap and the whole program got defunded one bit at a time until it was all but an in'name'only line item, with half-assed proof of concept models and downgraded but still formidable by local standards atmosphere-only mektons that take advantage of the merge piloting technology but nothing more. Mecha with a merged pilot get refined armor while the pilot is merged but Ablative otherwise.
Original concept includes several Mekton systems as standard equipment:
Merge with Your Mecha, obviously, and Esper Lens is meant to be inheerent to the Merge system as well. Espers as such are vanishingly rare among earth's population, though, and what few there are, are mainly martial artists with the more subtle powers - things like Aura Sensing, Psycjhometry, and Stat Boost, not Energy Manipulation, Telepathy, or Teleportation. That doesn't mean all pilots are active espers - though all pilots will have a Psi stat above zero, or the system doesn't work well enough to give combat-worthy results, call it a -5 Mecha Reflex penalty with Psi 0.
Transformation (Fighter) possibly Hybrid as well by Rule of Cool but it would require an unusually flexible mind not to go insane in such a form, or someone who thought they were sometimes a bird with arms or a flying hunchback. Noteably, Fighter form requires a normal cockpit and does not have the refined armor bonus. This is required because the Gravatic drive system (which is the only practical way to make a fighter operate at even interplanetary range) only operates in an arrowhead-shaped volume and energy cost per unit speed goes up drastically as volume increases, so getting a Humanoid form up to the same speed as a Fighter form is much more difficult. As per standard CP rules, except now there's a reaon beyond the aerodynamics which don't apply in space battles. The garvity drive does provide convenient psuedo-aerodynamic directional control, however, and constant "thrust" (energy input) equals a constant degree of spacetime deformation and hence constant velocity. In other words, f*** physics, this is space opera! Only not really, we only get to break physics along specifically codified lines.
Regeneration (TL9) This self-repair function also makes the mecha slowly alter themselves for higher performance and to best suit the pilot who uses them, and in the process get worse for anyone else - since the listed systems will make them quite expensive, call it -1 M.Ref per 200cp of modification from the standard model. This is probably how the interestingly-insane-would-never-make-it-in-the-military-but-there's-a-war-on pilot whose mecha gains a Hybrid form comes in, most likely.
Vague plot ideas from here involve allying with the new alien faction, fighting off the nastybad aliens, and possibly conquering the galaxy with the power of hot blooded pilots and/or j-pop idol singers, probable blue haired alien hotties (metal concentrating hair follicles, remember? Chomium got its name for a reason!) but nothing overly detailed. Except that its definitely meant to be more Macross in overall tone than Gundamned.
- CD
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
A secure meeting room, The Pentagon, Washington DC, 200x
"So some of the aliens are giants, so what?"
"So, despite being giants, aside form some very minor differences that we think are actually engineered adaptations - they can avoid poisoning from certain metals, chromium, strontium, a few others, by concentrating them in their hair follicles for example - these 'aliens' are human. Both the giants, and the normal sized ones."
"That's ridiculous. You'll be telling me they want to steal earth's women next."
"Ridculous? Maybe, but I'll tell you this - one of the females wasn't dead so long that we couldn't get viable ova samples from her body. After the other tests showed human genetics, they fertilised some with samples from a human."
"Are you seriously telling me there's alien halfbreeds growing in a lab somewhere? I didn't join the service to get wrapped up in a bad science fiction plot."
"No, of course not. The embryos were never implanted, and the one that was allowed to progress until a synthetic culture medium couldn't support it barely got to the size of a grain of sand before the cells died. It's just final proof that biologically speaking, they'rre human in every important way. But that's not the real important factor, it's that most of the bodies were big enoguh that with human proportions their bodies should have collapsed under their own mass, espescially since the onboard gravity was slightly higher than Earth-normal, if only by a few tencths of a percent."
"Again, so what? They have some kind of magic to break the laws of physics?"
"If you know science fiction, you'll know the adage that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. It seems that somewhere out there is an apparently human civilization that is sufficiently advanced."
"My nephew reads that crap, not me. I'm a practical man, Hudson. What's the bottom line that justifies spending millions on some boondoggle walking machines that as an old tank gunner I say would make lovely artillery targets and terrible armor profiles."
"Somehow, the giants' flesh is tougher than aluminum but still flexible when they want to move, and the only artificial structures we could find in the bodies was a nano-grown nervous system overlay to keep their reflex times to scale rather than relying on normal neurochemistry. We don't know how that worked, but we do know that someow, their humanoid war machines turn the pilot into some kind of quantum energy state, then reinforce their own structure just as much while hosting it. What's more, we got a volunteer to do it with one of the functional units. He came out of it as a giant after the first test, then switched at random several times through subsequent tests."
"I said bottom line, not more details. What's that all mean?"
"While the the war machine had a pilot, nothing smaller than a 105mm artillery shell could damage it. You could fire your old tank's gun at it all day and not even scrath the paint, General. We don't know why it works, but we have some idea how. A duplicate unit already exists in the lab, but there was a problem we didn't expect. We didn't have it connected to anything but test equipment. It's a good thing we used monkeys for test subjects instead of volunterers, they all came out catatonic, or at best showing signs of severe autism - until we mounted it in an articulated humanoid frame. Then, the clumsy hydraulics displayed much finer control than with an external operator and phsychological damage vanished. The bottom line? Any machine with one of these energy-state control cores is a superweapon, and only a machine shaped generally like the merged pilot can use one. That's why we need to spend millions on walking battle machines. Otherwise, we'd be helpless against them."
"I still don't like it, but I'll accept that for the sake of argument. Fine, there's humans flying around in space with super robots we'd have to go nuclear to stop. Far from ideal, and some kind of defense is obviously going to be neccessary, but what makes you so sure that they're going to be hostile? If they really aee human, at least some will be of course, but do we haver any evidence? Please don't tell me this is where the saucer nut stuff like crop circles and cattle mutilation comes in."
"No... if what we've extracted from the ship's computers is accurate, they don't bother with that kind of thing."
"Well that's a relief, at least -"
"-they go straight to orbital bombardment with megaton asteroids to suppres any native civilisation, then bring in processing ships the size of England to strip mine the planet's biological and mineral rescources right down to the point where the rock gets to be too soft and semi-molten to support large equipment, draining off the oceans along the way to fill the envirnonmental systems of the new ships that get built with the result. Then the ships get populated with a new crew, and set out to repeat the cycle."
"... That's not the kind of denial I wanted to hear, Hudson."
"I know, sir. It's not the kind of report I wanted to give."
"We don't always get what we want, do we, Hudson?"
"No sir."
"But it looks like this time, we're going to have to find the funding to get what we need. Alright, you have my support when you present this to the Joint Chiefs on Monday. The Air Force is going to balk, when they just barely got delivery on the F-22 in deployable numbers, but with my say so there should be at elast enough weight to get a Presidential review of this material as well, and I know Jack - he won't sit on this or dither around."
"I hope not, sir. I happen to like the continents the way they're currently arranged, and at least a few of the people living on them."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Game Start Time is around 20 years later, when the next alien ship shows up. They fight a few initial skirmishes because they recognise the tech-base, but are bewildered by the lack of a defense fleet eyond a few hundred cutters and even more by the lack of planetary harvesting going on, most of all by signs of a civilian population on the surface. Spies get sent down to try to figure out what in the galaxy is going on.... this is a different, altogether less rapacious, bunch of Homo Sapiens Xenoterrene. There may have been a small skirmish or two with scout ships like the first that crashed in the meantime, to keep governemtn interest focussed, or maybe the defenses are even more crap and the whole program got defunded one bit at a time until it was all but an in'name'only line item, with half-assed proof of concept models and downgraded but still formidable by local standards atmosphere-only mektons that take advantage of the merge piloting technology but nothing more. Mecha with a merged pilot get refined armor while the pilot is merged but Ablative otherwise.
Original concept includes several Mekton systems as standard equipment:
Merge with Your Mecha, obviously, and Esper Lens is meant to be inheerent to the Merge system as well. Espers as such are vanishingly rare among earth's population, though, and what few there are, are mainly martial artists with the more subtle powers - things like Aura Sensing, Psycjhometry, and Stat Boost, not Energy Manipulation, Telepathy, or Teleportation. That doesn't mean all pilots are active espers - though all pilots will have a Psi stat above zero, or the system doesn't work well enough to give combat-worthy results, call it a -5 Mecha Reflex penalty with Psi 0.
Transformation (Fighter) possibly Hybrid as well by Rule of Cool but it would require an unusually flexible mind not to go insane in such a form, or someone who thought they were sometimes a bird with arms or a flying hunchback. Noteably, Fighter form requires a normal cockpit and does not have the refined armor bonus. This is required because the Gravatic drive system (which is the only practical way to make a fighter operate at even interplanetary range) only operates in an arrowhead-shaped volume and energy cost per unit speed goes up drastically as volume increases, so getting a Humanoid form up to the same speed as a Fighter form is much more difficult. As per standard CP rules, except now there's a reaon beyond the aerodynamics which don't apply in space battles. The garvity drive does provide convenient psuedo-aerodynamic directional control, however, and constant "thrust" (energy input) equals a constant degree of spacetime deformation and hence constant velocity. In other words, f*** physics, this is space opera! Only not really, we only get to break physics along specifically codified lines.
Regeneration (TL9) This self-repair function also makes the mecha slowly alter themselves for higher performance and to best suit the pilot who uses them, and in the process get worse for anyone else - since the listed systems will make them quite expensive, call it -1 M.Ref per 200cp of modification from the standard model. This is probably how the interestingly-insane-would-never-make-it-in-the-military-but-there's-a-war-on pilot whose mecha gains a Hybrid form comes in, most likely.
Vague plot ideas from here involve allying with the new alien faction, fighting off the nastybad aliens, and possibly conquering the galaxy with the power of hot blooded pilots and/or j-pop idol singers, probable blue haired alien hotties (metal concentrating hair follicles, remember? Chomium got its name for a reason!) but nothing overly detailed. Except that its definitely meant to be more Macross in overall tone than Gundamned.
- CD
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows
If I had more GM experience than a single D&D3.5 session, or even just a solid idea for a module plot I'd give it a shot as a PBEM or something, but none of those ifs are ises right now...
