Macross SEED

[Valles]

Well, once upon a time, there was Kidou Senshi Gundam, and it was good. As time went by and the series aged, art and plots improved beyond where they had been when Gundam was first produced. But that was all right, since the people responsible for the series had gone on to make -new- shows under the same name, perpetuating the franchise and keeping at least some incarnation of the concept fresh for each new generation of viewers.
Despite this, however, the -first- Gundam aged and began to languish in obscurity.
And then, there was Gundam SEED, and it was the plot and soul of KSG brought forward in time and reborn into something as good for -its- era as its predecessor had been in its own time.
...
Once upon a time, there was Cho Jiku Yosai Macross, and it was good...
Ja, -n
(willing to write it himself if no one else will.)
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"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."

[ECSNorway]

Hmmmm.
Tempting. Very tempting.--
"Use of unnecessary violence in the apprehension of General Zod has been approved."
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.

[Valles]

Opening Voiceover:
I was born in 2029, in a small town on the Big Island of Hawaii. History would later record that year as the one when the last hope of peace between the Oceanic Treaty Organization and the Pan-Asian Alliance finally vanished. My father was one of the OTO's best pilots during the early days of the war that finally erupted six years later, one of those brilliant men who, if they were remembered at all, would only be known as the ones who first taught legends like Suki Singhe, or "Baron" Fokker.
The pretext for the conflict was the contest to control the rich mineral resources of central Africa, but there was no one on either side who believed that it was only that, and so it raged on for nine blood-soaked years, savaging wilderness, farmland, and shattering dozens of major cities.
I had only just reported in for mandatory flight training the week after my fifteenth birthday when the entire daytime sky went solid, brilliant white. For a few hours the two warring sides fell into a confused frenzy, butchering each other as never before, but then an astronomical observatory in Paraguay captured an image of the massive - and unmistakeably artificial - object that had been captured into a parabolic orbit out of the very center of the Flare.
Things moved very quickly after that, with accusations and denials flying fast and heavy between the PAA, the OTO, and the Neutral Nations Group as the alien object moved closer along its inevitable course towards the Earth. When the object began to maneuver under its own power, everything went still, as the people of the world leaned forwards and held their breath, waiting to see what happened.
The first exploratory team to arrive at the site of the alien vessel's planetfall found a massive, obviously warlike ship, several miles long and bristling with weapons. Despite its size and self-evident power, however, it had been damaged, severely, in the not-too-distant past.
As we learned more, several inevitable conclusions were reached - this derelict's enemies might well be our own. We could not afford to be unprepared if they were.
And, most of all, we would have no hope if we were not united.
By the time I was twenty, both the integration of the three major leagues into a true United Nations and the frantic, desperate effort to repair and refit that utterly alien technology into something that Earth could risk relying on for her defense were coming to fruition - helped, in their different ways, by the puzzling discovery that the 'alien' language was nothing more or less than an almost-unaltered version of the ancient language from which the entire Indo-European linguistic group had evolved...
For my part, I wanted nothing to do with it. I had no love for the military, not after the way they had thrown away my father's life and memory, and the popularity of air shows and other spectacles in the suddenly-flush atmosphere of the post-war period meant that, as someone who had been learning to fly almost from birth, I was never short of work.
Then the sky went white again...

---

Ja, -n
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"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."

[Valles]

So, plotline -
-Alien starship crash-lands.
-Alien starship rebuilt by humans.
-Other aliens come to capture starship.
-Tragic Misunderstanding.
-Starship does something Massively Stupid with its FTL drive, ends up in outer solar system. (I vote Neptune, because its scenery is so much more interesting than Pluto's)
-Running battle between aliens and starship.
-Starship gets home, but can't stay b/c it draws too much fire.
-Starship's original owners get word, come back to reclaim it and kick much ass in the process.
-Humans ally with original bunch of aliens.
-Big Fucking Space Battle, Earth scorched as collateral damage.
And universe elements -
-Valkyries!
-Giant alien clones!
-Precursor civilization that mucked with humanity's genes.
-Anti-military barnstormer as main character.
-Responsible girl as starship's flight controller.
-Singer girl who can knock clones' socks off.
-Legendary fighter ace (tm).
-Calm and supremely badass rookie wingman.
-Lovable lummox wingman.
-Green Haired Space Babe.
-Love triangle between barnstormer, flight controller, and singer.
-Love-at-first-sight between calm rookie and space babe.
Doubtless I've missed something - let me know what!
Ja, -n
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"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."

[Bob Schroeck]

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Doubtless I've missed something - let me know what!

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Singer girl is not an irritating bimbo?

-- Bob
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It's a "magical" land. I think "magical" is ancient Greek for "pain in the butt". -- Bun-Bun, Sluggy Freelance, 11/9/03

[DHBirr]

What about singer girl's power-hungry pseudo-pacifist jerk cousin?
Actually, depending on how close you want to stick to the original, it might produce some interesting shades of characterization to make the singer not be an irritating bimbo.DHBirr
"Up, lad, up! We've villages to pillage, maidens to slay, and dragons to rescue!"
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Big Brother is watching you.  And damn, you are so bloody BORING.

[Valles]

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Singer girl is not an irritating bimbo?

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Well, since we want the triangle to be a source of tension rather than an obnoxious farce, no. For that matter, I'm thinking of her sound as more 'Amy Lee of Evanescence covers early Bon Jovi' than J-pop. (after all, look at it this way: which'd make more of an impression on you: 'My Boyfriend's a Pilot' or 'Living on a Prayer'?)

---

What about singer girl's power-hungry pseudo-pacifist jerk cousin?

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Only if we get to kill him off horribly. */jk* Actually, I was limiting myself to important characters.
Other thoughts I had during the multi-hour drive home from Marshall for Thanksgiving:
I think that the VF-1 is so utterly emblematic of Macross in general and Space War One in particular that avoiding it would be not only impossible, but wrong. That said, I also think that we'd be well advised to go with the better-fleshed-out VF-0 from the recent prequel OAVs - just because I don't think you could possibly get a cooler version that's still recognizable as the same mech. The Super's FAST packs will get a redesign - I have sketches, or will shortly, anyway - and I'd vote to replace the hideous/silly 'Full Armor' variant with an atmospheric FAST set - which I've already done preliminaries for.
Personally, there are several aspects of the SDF-1's proportions and design that have always bothered me - particularly the arrangement and relative scale of the engines and the mere existence of that whole transformation thing. Whether or not it gets a redesign of its own is something I'll put out on the table for discussion for now.
Erm... 'Zentraedi' mecha (and, BTW, are we keeping the names from the original or creating a nominally new universe, the way SEED itself did?): Ditch the whole 'Battle Pod' bullshit! After all, if the entire point of having Zentraedi be that big is that they can fight mecha hand-to-hand, why throw that advantage away by putting them in a vehicle rather than a powersuit? I'd say replace the whole spectrum of gear (yes, including the Female Power Armor - the thing's ugly as sin) and replace it with four different suit types (divided trooper and command, male and female), each of which would only carry one or two weapons rather than having them built in (after all, how the heck do you -control- a setup like that?)
'Desdroid' is an adaptation of 'Demeter-Sikorsky Android' - "the DeS 'droid". The basic chassis has two plantigrade legs and associated powertrain, cockpit, reactor, some reaction mass, and thrusters powerful enough to maneuver in space or fall with style on Earth. It also has eight hot-swappable weapons hardpoints of varying size - four small 'bolt on' type points on the shoulders and outer thighs, two in the outer chest, where the Gladiator and Tomahawk have their missile bays, and the biggest two where the arms end abruptly at the elbows. ^_^
The pods I've thought up can be divided into small, medium, large...
Small can be an AMS system, an electronic warfare pod, a scanner pod, a 'light' gunpod (about 30mm or so), six heavy anti-mecha missiles (compare the real world Maverick), four anti-shipping missiles (a la the real Exocet and its competitors), ten anti-aircraft missiles (which'd be what the canon Macross medium missiles would count as) or seven fairly dumb artillery missiles (the USA's M-270 MLRS.)
Medium can have either a double or triple mount of the 'small' types (varies by weapon - eight shipkillers or fourteen artillery rockets, but thirty SAMs and eighteen 'botbusters - and can be mix-n-matched at that level, too, frex, ten SAMs, a gunpod, and an AMS), but adds the possibility of a heavier gunpod (like a light naval piece) or an energy weapon (probably a laser).
Large is about three times the size of a medium - multiply lighter weapon numbers by the appriate amount and there you are - and adds things like heavy gatling cannon (~75mm, say) with a metric assload of ammunition for the air defense role, or heavy particle guns like the Tomahawk's for line combat.
Mrg. I've got more to say about wierd-ass alien tech and scientific realism, but it's late and my feet are cold.
See you in the morning, folks.
Ja, -n
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"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."

[Bob Schroeck]

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What about singer girl's power-hungry pseudo-pacifist jerk cousin?

---

Converted into beef jerky.


-- Bob
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It's a "magical" land. I think "magical" is ancient Greek for "pain in the butt". -- Bun-Bun, Sluggy Freelance, 11/9/03

[Bob Schroeck]

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Well, since we want the triangle to be a source of tension rather than an obnoxious farce, no. For that matter, I'm thinking of her sound as more 'Amy Lee of Evanescence covers early Bon Jovi' than J-pop. (after all, look at it this way: which'd make more of an impression on you: 'My Boyfriend's a Pilot' or 'Living on a Prayer'?)

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Cool, I like that. Also, you can get a little humor out of the dichotomy between the stage persona and (if you go full Evanescence) song contents, and her actual off-stage personality. (From what little I've seen, Amy Lee appears to be this chirpy chpper little thing who seems to be completely at odds with her singing voice and E's choice of songs...)
As noted immediately above, I vote for ditching the cousin, or at least revamping him thoroughly.
Everything else looks pretty damned interesting and reasonable. I do have to make one mandatory pun/reference:

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Small can be an AMS system,

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Which involves an operator coming out of a mirror to offer the target a wish... limited, of course, to way in which they wish to die. Oh, wait, that's an A!MS system. Slight difference there...

-- Bob
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It's a "magical" land. I think "magical" is ancient Greek for "pain in the butt". -- Bun-Bun, Sluggy Freelance, 11/9/03

[Black Aeronaut]

Wow. I like where this is going! Hmmm... Wonder if you would consider me submitting an idea for what a 'new' SDF-1 would look like and could do, neh?
BTW; you guys still have yet to see just what my Kamikaze ASF looks like. I also have an idea for an Aerospace Interceptor Fighter based on the Yukikaze fighters in Sentou Yousei Yukikaze.-NeoRaven
"I became insane with long intervals of horrible sanity." -Edgar Allen Poe
Sponsored by Black Aeronaut Technologies -
Aerospace solutions for the discerning spacer.-NeoRaven

"I became insane with long intervals of horrible sanity." -Edgar Allen Poe

Sponsored by Black Aeronaut Technologies -

Aerospace solutions for the discerning spacer.

[Valles]

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Wow. I like where this is going! Hmmm... Wonder if you would consider me submitting an idea for what a 'new' SDF-1 would look like and could do, neh?

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*leans forward* Do tell. ^_^

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I also have an idea for an Aerospace Interceptor Fighter based on the Yukikaze fighters in Sentou Yousei Yukikaze.

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*reminds self to see that some day*
Anyway, while I do think that having the 'conventional' military forces developed and detailed is a very good idea, I'm rather leery of allowing direct resemblance to other anime or fiction - ideally, if/when we finish the project up, I, at least, would find it personally satisfying if we had something that the original Japanese studio could look at and decide to animate with minimal alteration.
Erm. Going into the science bit I dropped last night, my thoughts essentially run to the terran forces using three distinct types of technology.
1.) Real-world, near-future type stuff. This includes all conventional military forces, most projectile and missile weapons, and the new series' answer to the original's ARMD platforms and other space gear. Newton's Laws apply in full, gravity comes from spinning things, and for god's sake, watch you remass guage!
2.) Stuff copied off the SDF-1. Self-perpetuating structural integrity forcefields (which allow things like the desdroids and Valks), 'Zero Point' power systems, beam guns (on which more anon), etc. Flashy and noteworthy, but by no means common.
3.) Wierd Black Box alien stuff. Fold drives, antigravity, artificial gravity, various other systems that are integrated into the SDF-1's structure.
Okay, about the quantum stuff. I'd suggest that the Valks and such use quantum taps (ie, pulling power out of the structure of spacetime) rather than fusion? Why, well, because it provides a justification for those beam-guns-which-act-nothing-like-real-particle-beam-weapons - they're not throwing particles, they're ripping a swath of dissasembled spacetime through a certain volume x meters long and y millimeters across, and that even is scattering off tremendous amounts of energy and random exotic particles - which, amoung other things, means that it's really bright. It's still not perfect, but it comes a lot closer to the way we've been shown that these weapons are supposed to act.
Ja, -n
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"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."

[Evil Midnight Lurker]

What about the psi stuff that snuck in during M7? And other story elements from that, for that matter? Not necessarily speaking up for them, you understand, just raising the question.
Anima Spiritia ... could be taken or left. I liked it better, frankly, when it was just a matter of pure culture-clash that had the Zents so vulnerable.
The Inspection Army/Patrollers, though, in some form or other...
Bringing it back to basics: what should the story behind this batch of aliens be? Same basic "soldier-race with no one left to tell them to stop fighting" deal? Or is their ancient enemy still around?
Are there any other sentient species, or have the Zentradi been wiping them out wherever they find any?
In Original Macross, as far as I can tell, the Zentradi didn't want to just blow up the SDF-1 because they needed to find out how the microns could have repaired it--their own network of fully-automated construction systems was breaking down and they didn't have a clue how to fix things on their own.
There's also the overall theme of "each side assumes, incorrectly, that the other side knows where its towel is."
--Sam
"Gravity is a harsh mistress."

[Valles]

Hm. My thoughts at this stage are:
Way back at the dawn of time, the Precursors had a major, extremely powerful intragalactic empire. They were not, however, sufficiently powerful to feel themselves secure against all known or plausible threats, and so conducted extensive research into new weapons and technologies.
After playing around with robotics and such - which didn't work out just because they were Really Alien and couldn't conceptualize the problem in a way that could be solved cost-effectively, they started tinkering around with genetic engineering, trying to create a non-sapient soldier race who could nevertheless be smart enough to make effective warriors.
And it seemed to work, so they started cloning and outfitting defensive armies to do their fighting for them.
The reason they based their work off of humans was simple: It was more efficient to start with a sapient and work back than the other way around, and out of all the sapient races they had found, we hairless apes from Planet Earth had the simplest genetics - making us the best subjects for manipulation.
Then they ran into what they'd been afraid of all along. The Others had taken an entirely different approach to their military planning than the Precursors - they'd gone and developed psi as a science (pardon the pun).
If it hadn't turned out that the Precursors had been wrong about the intelligence of their Zentraedi minons - they were quite sapient, just so well-conditioned they usually didn't act it - then the Others could have taken control of their entire military and won handily. Instead, they only grabbed about half the fleet.
True to form, the Precursors looked at the problem and tried to engineer a life-form to solve it - in this case, by going back to their previous guinea pigs and trying to give them psi powers comperable to those they had observed the Others using to steal their troops... They didn't know about the amplifiers the Others were using, and in fact generally had no fucking clue what they were doing, but somehow they managed to get a 'working model' anyway. She wasn't near as strong as they'd have liked, but she was better than nothing, so they started a batch of clones at the research station and...
Then things got real ugly. When the dust had mostly settled, the galaxy looked rather different - the Precursors and the Others had wiped each other out entirely, and there were random fragments of Zentraedi being scattered onto almost every habitable world in the galaxy as they abandoned damaged starships and started waiting for rescue that would never come. Some of those worlds would have biochemical factors close enough to Earth's that their inhabitants - once they had stumbled on to the whole 'sex' thing - eventually bred back to baseline human (kind of like how fancy koi end up looking like ordinary carp after a few generations), and others were harsher and so kept reinforcing the standard Zentraedi mods. The rest of the Zentraedi? Well, they kept fighting, on both sides, growing fewer and fewer, having less and less resources every millenium.
And in the meantime, the forgotten batch of psi-clones were breeding themselves and their potential out into the homeworld's genetic pool.
The SDF-1 started off as a command ship for the Others' relatively small original navy, and was converted for Zentraedi use when the war started going more and more badly, since the Others were very slow-breeding.
The Zentraedi have, say, three ship designs - a defense ship, which is a relatively small ship with a lot of anti-mecha guns, an attack ship, which is about the same size as its defensive counterpart but was built wrapped around a Big Fucking Gun, and a troop ship, which is ten times the size of either and quite lightly armed, except for the thousands and thousands of armored Zentran/Meltram warriors it can deploy at will. The Attack Ships, BTW, are quite rare - the Precursors didn't design them until after they first ran into the Others.
The SDF-1's original specs were fairly typical of Other ship design - large but agile for its size, massively armored, heavily armed, and insanely well-defended by both point-defense and energy shields. The Others used a lot more different ship types than the Zentraedi, but they were usually so flexible that the only real difference from one type to another was their weight class. Oh, yeah - and they liked spinal mounts.
Post-rebuild, the SDF-1 has lost about half of its reaction mass bunkerage (yes, Newton applies even for the elder races), a similar proportion of its secondary (ie, non-spinal) energy weapons, and all but the armor out of its defensive complement. However, the UN replaced and actually beefed up the flak guns and swapped around the remaining beam cannon for better coverage - then dumped heavy missile launchers in where the missing ones had been, which makes it a rather more dangerous proposition at long (ie, light-second-plus) range.
Neither of the Elder races had had much use for missiles, BTW, since, each for their own reasons, neither were very good at the computer technology needed for ECCM and such. Humans, OTOH, are, and so love the things.
Most of the UN's space navy at this point is made up of Active Response Mobile Defense platforms, which, rather than the brick-like things we saw in the original, rather resemble the Discovery from 2001, except for the massive rotating habitation carousel. Rather than a sphere, their bow section looks like the head of a sledgehammer - long axis parallel to that of the ship rather than perpendicular, BTW - and carries the ship's primary armarment of about a dozen very heavy missiles. (How heavy? One hit and a capital ship's toast heavy.) Add in about twice as many recoverable USVs and a fairly comprehensive CIWS system and there you are. Overall displacement, say, one to two hundred thousand tons.
Besides those ships, there are a considerable number of asteroid-based listening posts scattered across pretty much the entire solar system along with mostly-automated fuel depots at each of the gas giants' LaGrange points and water-mining operations on their moons.
The standard design for a UN Spacy space station is a central pod run through the center of a large structural ring (size as yet undetermined) and connected to same by a few narrow pylons. Grav sections have their hubs on either end of the central pod, and storage tanks, flight decks, or assorted other random crap gets bolted on around the rim of the ring - parallel to the central pod, BTW, not to the ring itself.
How big should the ring be? Well, just barely big enough to fit the SDF-1 through the middle of it...
Ja, -n
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"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."

[jpub]

Am I the only person who invariably thinks of Star Control when someone mentions "Precursors"?--
Christopher Angel, aka JPublic
The Works of Christopher Angel

[Evil Midnight Lurker]

No, but the term suffers from overuse. Lately it makes me think of Charles Sheffield first.
(It also brings up Brian Daley, which brings us back to Macross via a somewhat circuitous route.)
--Sam
"Are you *happy campers*?"

[Valles]

Heh. Okay, granted, but really, what else can we call them? Forerunners? Some made-up name?
(No, I don't want to keep them as the Protoculture. Even aside from the Macek taint, 'proto' carries entirely the wrong connotations in English - it makes them seem like they weren't yet a culture, stet?)
Which reminds me that I still need to pick the phonemes I want to use to invent Zentradese. ^_^
Ja, -n
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"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."

[Evil Midnight Lurker]

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Ditch the whole 'Battle Pod' bullshit! After all, if the entire point of having Zentradi be that big is that they can fight mecha hand-to-hand, why throw that advantage away by putting them in a vehicle rather than a powersuit?

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The point of the Regult system was its massive cheapitude. Nothing but simple propulsion (land and space), life support system, and minimal sensors--the bare minimum to support a weapons platform. No armor worth speaking of, easy control setup. They could be churned out in the billions and handed over to an equal amount of barely-sapient grunts fresh out of the cloning vats.
Sheer. Overwhelming. Numbers.
There was only one Regult factory left in 2009, and it was still just enough to keep what was left of the Zentradi armada supplied. Imagine the numbers they must have been able to throw at their enemies back in the day.

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eventually bred back to baseline human (kind of like how fancy koi end up looking like ordinary carp after a few generations)

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Unless these Zents are radically different from the originals, I can't quite see this.
The only explanation for Zentradi-Micron conversion that makes any sense to me (at least in the original series) is that Zentradi bodies aren't really human--not even in biochemistry; probably have boron and silicon substituting for calcium and iron, like the dragons of Pern--but that their genetic code can be translated into human DNA. So the Micron chambers create a human replicant of the Zent and the Zent's mind is fed into it, and the original body broken down; or vice-versa. (This does match what little we saw of the process--the big body fades out and a tiny one fades in within the lower tank.)
So unless the refugees held on to micronization tech, or unless it's a seriously different situation...
Other thoughts:
-Can we please, this time around, say "Space Navy" instead of "Spacy?" God, "Robotech Defense Force" actually sounded better.
-The spelling "Zentraedi" is unique to Robotech. Pure Macross, it's either "Zentradi" or "Zjentowlaudey" (or something like that).
-Do the Zentradi ships still look like biotech, without actually being biotech? (A friend just the other day reminisced about Breetai's flagship as a "giant green space turd.")
--Sam
"Do you remember the moment... when our eyes met for the first time?"

[Evil Midnight Lurker]

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Heh. Okay, granted, but really, what else can we call them? Forerunners? Some made-up name?

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The problem there is that everything I can think of has also been overused. Ancients, First Ones, et cetera...
Primevals?
--Sam
"Not so fast, naughtyspawn!"

[Valles]

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The point of the Regult system was its massive cheapitude. *snip good points*

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To this argument, I offer a simple counter - if a Regult is cheap, how much would it cost to build an armored spacesuit - not even neccessarily powered, since half the point of them being Zentradi is that they don't need anything past their bare hands to go toe to toe with mecha (granted, on those terms, they'd lose, but...) - to roughly the same standards? We're talking about comperable space movement, seperate weapons, and at most a quarter of the dry mass - probably closer to an eighth.
That's for a grunt trooper, of course. The officer armors are powered and possibly have built in weapons (a la Knight Sabers), besides being infinitely tougher and faster.

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So unless the refugees held on to micronization tech, or unless it's a seriously different situation...

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Mmm. You've got a point about the cube-square law and biology thereof, but I think that the Precursors wouldn't have bothered to make their alterations stable and fully inheritable if it was simpler to do otherwise - remember, they weren't supposed to breed, just crank out a new batch of clones.
From what I understand of genetics, a temporary 'breed-like' change is a lot easier than full speciation. 'Galactic Microns' might well have kept the Zentradi biochemistry at the same time as they were losing the specific alterations that made them such giants...
Hm.
Oh, and for the aliens - yes, there are a few, but all of steam-age-or-better ones within reach of Earth were known to the Elders and ended up picking sides at one point or another during the showdown. With their conditioning forbidding contact with 'wild' cultures, the Zentradi have absolutely no reason to care one way or the other about them, so they're all just on the ground knapping flint and dealing with the band of human hunters across the valley, or whatever.

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-Can we please, this time around, say "Space Navy" instead of "Spacy?" God, "Robotech Defense Force" actually sounded better.

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Hm. Doesn't sound that bad to me, actually, and it seems like a logical construction of the language... Especially since one of the things that's been hovering in the back of my mind is to actually show how and why space ops are different from just 'aircraft carriers in space.'
How about 'Skywatch' instead?

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-The spelling "Zentraedi" is unique to Robotech.

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Ah? Did not know that. Fond as I am of 7 and Zero, my only actual exposure to the original was through the Robotech filter - and some years ago to boot.
Anyway, correction noted.

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-Do the Zentradi ships still look like biotech, without actually being biotech? (A friend just the other day reminisced about Breetai's flagship as a "giant green space turd.")

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*Magic 8 Ball* Answer unclear. Take a poll. */Magic 8 Ball*
Ja, -n
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"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."

[drakensis]

The EDTO (Earth Defense Treaty Organisation) Space Fleet
Centred around the SDF-1 and light vessels would seem a requirement to keep things the way they were in Macross. Bases on the Moon and Mars. Probably only a few true warships (I like the 2001 design plan, but maybe have fighters launching from a hanger along the spine) but more utility ships that can be converted into weapons platforms or crude fighter carriers by bolting on weapon packs or fighterbays.
The Grand Cannon would probably be better as orbital weapons platforms, possibly powered from the surface or something of the like - having your big gun down where it can be ortillaried to death seems profoundly stupid.
The modular fittings for destroids sounds good (Battletech copied the look, so copy their omnitech back). Probably there would be a few chassis - a fast, light one for scouting, a mid-range one to take best advantage of modular functions and a big bruiser with lots of armour (might be an Armored Destroid like the Armored Valkyrie).
The VF-0 design looks a little wimpy compared to the VF-1, but if the VF-1 were protrayed with the same level of detail as in Macross Zero I think it would look fine. Modular fast packs like the Electronic warfare and the Super/Strike configurations from DYRL would keep the Valkyrie flexible and makes the Armour Valkyrie just a particularly heavy set of FAST packs.

The Zentreadi
I tend to agree with the basic arguements against the Regult - I agree that they're cheap and can be mass-produced but:
a) they don't take advantage of having giant pilots
b) they're ugly
The alternative that springs to mind is that the Zentreadi did apparently have some light body armour that had full life support and was in a similar ballpark to the Regult for resilience i.e. made of paper. Were it to look less dorky then a jump-pack could be strapped on and the zentreadi can simply carry a gunpod equivalent, or melee weapons or zentreadi-scale man-portable heavy weapons. And that's even cheaper than a Pod.
Power armour can be cleaned up and kitted out to the elite troops with Male and Female types. Fighter pods would retain a role for trans-atmospheric jobs and missions requiring their high top speeds.
I'd evisage the standard zentreadi warship being similar in concept to the ISD in star wars, enough guns to handle itself in a fight (but no spinal BFG), enough fighters (fighter pods) for a fighter screen and a large complement of troopers (zentreadi in light body armour). These exist in mind-boggling quantities. Rarer (but numerous enough for entire battlegroups) and far more powerful are the dreadnoughts that do have a spinal VBFG, shedloads of guns in all sizes but they don't increase the number of troopers proportionally. Power Armour aces ride on these. At about the same size are the command ships, which have much better defenses and a BFG but fewer guns overall. If the Precursors or Others were at a battle they rode these. Guess what crashed onto the Earth.No Quarter, NO QUARTER! You damn well earned your fate.
Give Harrington our compliments; we're sorry you are late.
- No Quarter, Echoes Children
D for Drakensis

You're only young once, but immaturity is forever.

[Valles]

EDTO name, design, and deployments: Sounds good!

---

The modular fittings for destroids sounds good (Battletech copied the look, so copy their omnitech back). Probably there would be a few chassis - a fast, light one for scouting, a mid-range one to take best advantage of modular functions and a big bruiser with lots of armour (might be an Armored Destroid like the Armored Valkyrie).

---

I'm not sure about having the different chassis - after all, you've already got your scouting and light combat functions covered by your VFs, and far better than something as clumsy as...
Y'know, I just remembered some thoughts I'd had on why the VF concept might make sense - what if the forcefield and joint technologies that were developed for the light desdroid project were noted, by one Transformers fan on the design team, as being able to support the stresses of a true transformation - and that the preliminary design they were thinking of fore same would take the same number of joints anyway.
Assume that the fighter mode uses durability, firepower, and brute force thrust to at least stay in spitting distance of the pure fighter designs prototyped off of the same technology and there you have it.
The VF-0's sleeker lines are deceptive, that way: it looks slimmer because it's longer than the VF-1, but not thicker. Sourcing here and here, the Phoenix is four meters longer and three tons heavier - in short, it's actually bigger than its more famous descendant.
Really, I've always thought that what we see in Macross Zero is just what the Valkyrie would have looked like on a better animation budget.
Armor designs... ohboy. The biggest difference between my concepts and the canon ones is that I think I've come up with a way to armor the fighter's nose.
There's an armored cap over the nosecone, which goes back to just in front of the cockpit on top and angles rather forward underneath, to clear the lock-on points for the battloid mode's legs. Behind that, on top, there's a sort of barrel-shaped armored cover that goes on over top of the cockpit and comes down to about the equator of the nose on the sides in front and angles up a little towards the rear, then a third cover layered over top if the intakes - what becomes the upper chest in battloid.
To transform, the middle armor shell pops up a little and slides down over the top half or so of the nose cone - thus giving just enough clearance for the intake block to move 'down' into the position that normally adds the armored panel over the cockpit.
The underside of the nose is covered by a single piece, which attaches at the rear, to one of the shoulders - thus letting it swing out and around as a shield for the battloid.
Obviously, an armored Valk is going to be operating on cameras-only.
The atmospheric armor pack is obviously very sleek and low-lying, similar in look if not detail to the thing shown at the bottom of this page (as, in fact, are the leg modules), except that it has its own wings, which are rather like an F-15's, and the entire assembly uses them and leaves the core fighter's tucked away like in battloid.
The space armor is much the same as the canon Super pack, but with the main gun replaced (a gun pod version of the Tomahawk beam cannon), and dorsal pods slightly longer than in canon and about two-to-three times as wide, so that they hang out and 'down' over the sides of the plane, blocking wing extension but not the shoulder blocks. Depending on what we decide looks best, those pods might have stubby wings of their own, or just carry their heavy missiles on 'fuselage' hardpoints coming right off the FAST packs.
Oh, and, both of my designs include armor for the thighs and knees, also - which increases protection (to 'just about total') but blocks the use of gerwalk mode unless you're willing to add quite a bit of complexity.
Then again, I don't consider gerwalk terribly useful anyway, so I'd say it's worth it.

---

The alternative that springs to mind is that the Zentreadi did apparently have some light body armour that had full life support and was in a similar ballpark to the Regult for resilience i.e. made of paper. Were it to look less dorky then a jump-pack could be strapped on and the zentreadi can simply carry a gunpod equivalent, or melee weapons or zentreadi-scale man-portable heavy weapons. And that's even cheaper than a Pod.

---

*points and hops up and down excitedly* Exactly! Exactly!
Fleet breakdown... mm. I'll need to think about it.
...
Hey, we've been spending all this time on the toys, but what about the characters? About the only thing we've established is that 'Hikaru' dislikes the military because he thinks they threw his father's life away and that 'Minmei' sounds like Amy Lee.
What's 'Misa' like? What's "Baron" Fokker's real name, and what's his girlfriend like? Etc, etc.
Ja, -n
===========

===============================================
"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."

[ECSNorway]

Here's a thought.
If it's going to be the EDTO, go ahead and make the cast truly international. Mix up the names a bit. In the original, we had a Russian captain, an American first officer, etc. Keep that dynamic.
So, go ahead. 'Hikaru Ichijyo' the fighter pilot who doesn't like the war. 'Lisa Hayes' the cool, competant, first officer. 'Lin Minmei', the teen singer/waitress. Whatever. Make the names reflect the nationality and background we build for the characters.
Taking CMDR Hayes as our example. Let's look back on her Macross history. She's a military brat, which means she was raised around soldiers and is quite a competant officer herself to have reached this kind of rank at a relatively young age.
What does it mean, that she's advanced that fast? Just how old is she? Call her, oh, 28 at the start of the series. She's a focused, driven officer, determined to live up to her father the admiral's expectations. Combat veteran, she'd have to be to get promoted that fast, she probably got her start on wet-navy carriers for whatever side America was on in the last war. Might have just come off a destroyer command (do we have lighter spacegoing craft than the ARMD? Something in an escort role, perhaps, that she could have commanded?)
Personality: Competant and agressive. She takes responsibility for her duties and fulfills them to the best of her ability. We're looking at a young Honor Harrington here, really: She simply doesn't know how to say "I can't" or "I give up". She expects the same out of others, and has no problem with handing someone a job and expecting them to Get It Done. Initiative and imagination are traits she admires. Failure... if it was because you just couldn't do it, she's fine with you, if she thinks you gave up out of laziness or fear she'll come down on you like a ton of bricks. She doesn't have much of a personal life, some think she's a bit of a workaholic. She'd have been infuriated by Hikaru's behavior in the first battle if it went as it did in the original series. While her anger would have faded when she found out he wasn't trained for Valkyries, the bad first impression would still sour things until he'd had a chance to show some potential in combat and up close and personal. --
"Use of unnecessary violence in the apprehension of General Zod has been approved."
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.

[Valles]

Viva Globalism!
Heh. Okay, let me try some historical background.
The Oceanic Treaty Organization grew out of the twentieth century's NATO pacts, and at the time of its formal formation represented a genuinely shocking percentage of the world's monetary and technological resources. The OTO was named as it was because the most notable characteristic of its founding member states was that all of them lay on either the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans - the notable among those nations being the United States of America, the European Union, the Commonwealth of Australia, Canada, Japan, the United Mexican States, and the Federative Republic of Brazil. All of its member states traded heavily with each other and enjoyed a considerable and ever-rising amount of cultural exchange and learning thanks to an otherwise neglible line or two in the founding accords, which authorized the creation and budgeting of an international public service organization to advocate and facilitate same.
In short - and this statistic really says it all - in 2005, the eventual members of the OTO had a combined GDP of more than thirty trillion dollars.
Out of about fifty-five trillion world wide.
The Pan-Asian Alliance, in contrast, would have had about 14 trillion. And more than two and a half billion citizens. Most of the Alliance's member states were there because of paranoia - because they were afraid of being eaten by the OTO. (which it likely wouldn't have, except maybe by accident.) As a rule, its early members fell into a few categories - most numerous in terms of governments were nations that were heavily influenced or outright controlled by Muslim religious conservatives - Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia, etc. The other three factions were really just single nations - the Russian Federation wanted to avoid having its economy entirely ripped apart by the 'tidal forces' of having the EU so near at hand, China was blatantly and agressively angling for a larger, even controlling share in world politics, and India... wanted to avoid having Pakistan talk the rest of the Alliance into declaring war on them. ^_^;
Nobody in any of the three coalitions ever tried to pretend that the Neutral Nations Group was anything but small fry - it was basically composed of those countries that were left over after the formation of the two major power blocks and wanted defensive partners but were too proud to go off with hat in hand, asking to be let it.
A quick glance at the relative virtues of the Alliance and the OTO will tell you very quickly that this war was really fucking messy - enough so that the Earth's population was actually lower in 2044 than it was thirty years earlier. Granted that most of that was because almost nobody was willing to bring kids into things with that big a clusterfuck on the horizon, but still.
The cultural climate in the wake of the formation of the EDTO is, I guess, a bit like the Roaring Twenties - like the world had walked out of hell and suddenly everybody was friends and the future was bright again. Yeah, okay, right, aliens, but still! They weren't here yet, right? Honey was home and the rationing was over...
Erm. Okay, that's it for now.
Moving on...
Lin Minmei, in the original, was, IIRC, three-quarters Chinese but born in Yokohama.
Obviously, here, Ningshui Jialan is more likely from Shanghai or someplace.
At the start of our series, she's eighteen and in her last year of high school, attending the one on Macross Island while her mother works on the last stages of the reconstruction of the SDF-1. She's a member of the school band and choir, as well as fronting for a moderately talented local act in her free time. Her father died in the war, which, combined with the fact that the Alliance was relatively strapped for cash, especially in the later stages of the war, means that she's got a much more realistic worldview than her counterpart - she had to do a lot of her growing up way too soon, and it shows.
She's not the queen of her school's social set or anything, but she does have a lot of friends and is known as a cheerful girl who can get along with almost anybody and often acts as a peacemaker between people who've got better memories and more dead relatives than the faculty would like them to.
For a twist, I might suggest that her occaisional meetings with her father when she was young might have instilled her with an attitude towards the military that's, well, just about opposite Hikaru's. Great respect for soldiers, pride that her father was one, etc. To start with, at least, she isn't planning on actually joining, partly because she and her little brother are all that's left of her family name and history for several generations on either side and partly just because she doesn't really think that her talents lie in that direction.
After the misfold, of course, the entire equation changes - which works out quite well, I think, since I seem to remember that air combat is organized according to pairs of planes. ^_^
Ooh. Thought: Timeline -
2023 - Lisa Hayes born.
2029 - Hikaru Ichijo born.
2033 - Lin Minmei born.
2044 - War ends, Visitor crashes, EDTO formed.
2051 - Superdimensional Fortress Macross launched.

...hmmm. Maybe should knock ten, twenty years off of that but otherwise?
Ja, -n
===========

===============================================
"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."

[Bob Schroeck]

---

Lin Minmei, in the original, was, IIRC, three-quarters Chinese but born in Yokohama.
Obviously, here, she's more likely from Shanghai or someplace.

---

A little voice in my head says "Singapore". Not quite sure why yet -- something to do with the odd mix of mores they have, maybe. Let me think on this.

-- Bob
---------
It's a "magical" land. I think "magical" is ancient Greek for "pain in the butt". -- Bun-Bun, Sluggy Freelance, 11/9/03

[classicdrogn]

Eh, just call them the First Empire, or some kind of physical description - they're supposed to be Really Alien, right, so call them Pentapods or something... though I for one would be in favor of taking back "Protoculture" from the clutches of Macek. Antediluvians maybe?
As for the Anima Spiritia stuff - music seems as good a method as any to bring about the focussed state of mind to activate psi powers, whether the sound as such is important or not. What can I say, I like the concept of an electric guitar as battlefield equipment.
I'm opposed to doing away with Full Armor variable fighters, though - if anything, lose the desdroids other than the Monster (even the Monster, if you shrink the size/firepower and do a heavy-artilery FA GERWALK) and use Full Armors in their place, as in post-Plus original Macross. The weight of all that strap on stuff restricts them to the same space-only or jumpjet flight, while the ability to shed it and perform as an aircraft to escape or re-engage, and you already have to train any pilot for one as mecha-infantry as well anyway, and mecha-infantry with enough navigation and piloting skill to get around on space-based duty. A Spacy Corps of Engineers version with big tool and materials bays instead of armor and ordnance would also make sense - with the addition of one or two Shuttle-arm or 'cherry picker truck' type platforms for vacsuited humans to get in and weld or bolt or whatever while the mecha holds whatever big oject requires that much strength to deal with in place.
All that said... I'm really not behind the whole 're-imagining Macross' thing. I mean, they tried to do that with Macross II, and while I kind of liked the VF-2SS, flightsuit, and Silvie's character design, the rest of it was meh at best. The sad part, thgouh, is that tht's the least-offensive remake I can think of... though granted, I don't like Gundam mechanical designs, and so didn't watch more than a couple episodes of the original and didn't even bother with SeeD. Then again, being the kind of fanatical macross purist who doesn't even speak the name of Macek's abomination, I'm probably not the intended audience anyway... Though I admit like Solty Rei BECAUSE it has BGC-like hardsuits used by a sort of Knight Sabers-ish group, not despite it - the thing is, I like it becuase they don't try to hang familiar names and only slightly different character designs on these new people. I guess what I'm saying with this is that new names and faces are desireable, even if they are in similar situations.
- CD
Edit: Okay, now that's freaky - I originally posted this at about 6pm...That which does not kill us... has made its last mistake.
SERVO: Loook *deeeeply* into my eyes... Tell me, what do you see?
CROW: (hypnotized) A twisted man who wants to inflict his pain upon others.
" It's crazy to try to spell out all the mega-nooks and hyper-crannies of a Borg contrivance." - Doug Drexler
--
"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