The EBSIS

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ESalter
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Re: The EBSIS

Unread post by ESalter »

Warshield73 wrote:The other thing to remember about the EBSIS is that they weren't strictly villains and weren't the enemy per se.

Actually, they were. A random encounter table in book two had the possibility of an immediate attack, and even when they didn't, they still supported Zentradi holdouts, bandits, and secessionists generally.

Warshield73 wrote:The RDF gave them a prototype submersible carrier...

The RDF sold them a prototype submersible carrier "[a]s part of a diplomatic overture"...which obviously failed due, presumably, to the Soviet's inherent treachery.
Warshield73 wrote:...and they worked with them in Africa...

No, they worked against them in Africa, supporting anti-RDF governments.

Warshield73 wrote:...and Asia.

I'm not familiar with this.

Warshield73 wrote:My players got an EBSIS base to help them against a massive Zentraedi army.

O.K., but what does that have to do with the EBSIS as written?

* * *


Warshield73 wrote:The problem is that the antagonists in Robotech aren't great for anything but combat. You can't interact with them outside of combat (during the war itself, after the war they just get absorbed into the human forces) so if you want some role play like using espionage and rogue skills.

Well, in the series itself there's quite a lot of non-combat interaction between the heroes and the aliens. I see the problem as being that most of the mysteries and problems in the series are solved in the end, which doesn't leave much for the PCs to do except sweep up footnotes.

Warshield73 wrote:The same is true in Invid Invasion/New Generation where most of the role play is with humans and zentraedi while the invid are more of looming threat.

I personally see "The New Generation" as the most open, since the Invid are so loosely defined, it gives the GM a lot of room to develop them. (Speaking of which, has anyone noticed this? I think it looks really interesting.)
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Re: The EBSIS

Unread post by Warshield73 »

ESalter wrote:
Warshield73 wrote:The other thing to remember about the EBSIS is that they weren't strictly villains and weren't the enemy per se.

Actually, they were. A random encounter table in book two had the possibility of an immediate attack, and even when they didn't, they still supported Zentradi holdouts, bandits, and secessionists generally.

Warshield73 wrote:The RDF gave them a prototype submersible carrier...

The RDF sold them a prototype submersible carrier "[a]s part of a diplomatic overture"...which obviously failed due, presumably, to the Soviet's inherent treachery.
Warshield73 wrote:...and they worked with them in Africa...

No, they worked against them in Africa, supporting anti-RDF governments.

Warshield73 wrote:...and Asia.

I'm not familiar with this.

Warshield73 wrote:My players got an EBSIS base to help them against a massive Zentraedi army.

O.K., but what does that have to do with the EBSIS as written?

I do not remember the EBSIS being this mustache twirling arch villain but to be fair I have not read these books in years. In my brief overview of the PDF's it still seems that they are more rivals than enemies but to me that is almost irrelevant. Most of what I have said stands as the EBSIS provides that chance for players to do actual roleplaying instead of just obliterating a bunch of battle pods.

ESalter wrote:
Warshield73 wrote:The problem is that the antagonists in Robotech aren't great for anything but combat. You can't interact with them outside of combat (during the war itself, after the war they just get absorbed into the human forces) so if you want some role play like using espionage and rogue skills.

Well, in the series itself there's quite a lot of non-combat interaction between the heroes and the aliens. I see the problem as being that most of the mysteries and problems in the series are solved in the end, which doesn't leave much for the PCs to do except sweep up footnotes.

Yes you understand. There is a similar problem in RPGs for lots of media including Star Wars. You can't blow up the Death Star, that is Luke's job. You can't destroy the Shield generator that's for Han and Leia. Robotech is actually more limiting because it is a much smaller stage than a galaxy far far away.

While your human PCs can interact with some micronized Zentraedi all the mysteries are really laid out in the media. EBSIS, warlords, and other antagonists allow for more mystery and conflict.

ESalter wrote:
Warshield73 wrote:The same is true in Invid Invasion/New Generation where most of the role play is with humans and zentraedi while the invid are more of looming threat.

I personally see "The New Generation" as the most open, since the Invid are so loosely defined, it gives the GM a lot of room to develop them. (Speaking of which, has anyone noticed this? I think it looks really interesting.)

I would not call it loosely defined I think it works because the Invid are so alien. They will completely ignore a mecha on the ground if it has no active protoculture and it didn't attack them but they might wipe out a village of unarmed civilians because they pick the wrong flowers.

The Invid as written are almost a force of nature and they bring a sense of menace to everything. You can use your Alpha or destroid to wipe out this gang of thieves trying to steal your crap but if you do the Invid might show up and ruin everyone's day. Just my favorite Robotech setting in both 1e and 2e.
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Re: The EBSIS

Unread post by ESalter »

Warshield73 wrote:I do not remember the EBSIS being this mustache twirling arch villain but to be fair I have not read these books in years. In my brief overview of the PDF's it still seems that they are more rivals than enemies...

They support bandits, secessionists, and hostile Zentradi, in addition to attacking on sight. That seems well within the territory of "enemy" to me.

Warshield73 wrote:...but to me that is almost irrelevant. Most of what I have said stands as the EBSIS provides that chance for players to do actual roleplaying instead of just obliterating a bunch of battle pods.

Even aside from the logic of making the Soviet Union a major enemy, what can they do, narratively, that the Zentraedi can't? I mean, Zentraedi can be sneaky....

Warshield73 wrote:[Comparing Star Wars to Robotech.]
Robotech is actually more limiting because it is a much smaller stage than a galaxy far far away.

Yes, the area of actionable space left over after the heroes are done with it is much smaller...

Warshield73 wrote:While your human PCs can interact with some micronized Zentraedi all the mysteries are really laid out in the media. EBSIS, warlords, and other antagonists allow for more mystery and conflict.

...but I personally don't think adding enemy Soviets solves the problem.
The original series was about human encounters with the alien. While you can put a human enemy in the Robotech universe, it's not going to have the same meaning.
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Re: The EBSIS

Unread post by Seto Kaiba »

Warshield73 wrote:I have to disagree with this. You have to remember that an adventure can last just hours or days in universe. There are months or maybe even a year between the rain of death and Khyron's attack and death.

While this is true, it doesn't really get one away from the war(s)... there were brief lulls in armed hostilities in the timeline, but those were always overshadowed by the consequences of the wars and the threat of further violence. That's why EBSIS was a thing in 1e: war was all there was in the Robotech setting so the best they could do for adventure hooks was someone else to fight.





ESalter wrote:Well, in the series itself there's quite a lot of non-combat interaction between the heroes and the aliens. I see the problem as being that most of the mysteries and problems in the series are solved in the end, which doesn't leave much for the PCs to do except sweep up footnotes.

Pretty much, yeah.


ESalter wrote:
Warshield73 wrote:The same is true in Invid Invasion/New Generation where most of the role play is with humans and zentraedi while the invid are more of looming threat.

I personally see "The New Generation" as the most open, since the Invid are so loosely defined, it gives the GM a lot of room to develop them.

The New Generation saga offers a bit more freedom with the narrative thanks to the hostilities with the Invid effectively being entirely one-sided. For all the fuss and noise the narrator makes about the Invid allegedly being evil slavers, the original story's writing shines through in that the Invid in the series are depicted as essentially uninterested in humanity's business unless someone does something that they perceive as a direct threat to them.

The main problem at that point is that Earth's such a mess that there's not a lot to do there anymore. There's no functioning government above the local level and sometimes not even that. There's no organized law enforcement most places apart from the occasional band of vigilantes armed with antique low-tech pistols. The main threat to humans is other humans in the form of biker gangs who've clearly seen Mad Max one too many times. Advanced technology is all but a memory except for caches of UEEF weapons that literally fall out of the sky. Yadda yadda preaching to the choir.


ESalter wrote:(Speaking of which, has anyone noticed this? I think it looks really interesting.)

Ah yeah, Genesis Breaker. Tatsunoko Production made some noise about that last year and put a blurb about it in the last MOSPEADA artbook, but even that coverage was painfully sparse and gives no indication of what format this MOSPEADA side story is expected to take or when it's supposed to come out. I've translated most of the article in the aforementioned artbook and it's mostly recap of the MOSPEADA TV series timeline, with a few relevant details sprinkled in.

Spoiler:
The story is a side story that occurs in parallel with the events of Genesis Climber MOSPEADA in 2083 after the failure of the Second Earth Recapture mission.

The title refers to the protagonist's unit, a specialist force attached to the Martian government's Intelligence Bureau whose codename "BREAKERS" is used in the same sense as "circuit breaker", as in "a device to interrupt something to prevent damage". They were originally founded to suppress dissent (by force) during the unification of Mars and they retain the License to Kill the Martian government's Intelligence Bureau gave them back then. For their operations on Earth, their headquarters is the Archelon: a ship stationed in low lunar orbit that is tasked with relaying all information which the BREAKERS collect back to Mars for analysis. The BREAKERS are equipped with a prototype Dark Ride Armor - what Robotech would call a "Shadow Cyclone" - being developed for the forthcoming Third Earth Recapture mission to maintain stealthiness on Earth while they study the Inbit. BREAKER-1, the main character also known as Gate, is the example Dark Ride Armor shown which is set up with reconnaissance gear for field observation.

Government intelligence agents, license to kill, the latest shiny tech toys... they're basically Space 00's with a less glamorous job.

For my money, the most interesting detail in the piece is one of the most inconsequential ones... the origin of the aliens name and its correct English spelling. Yes, we've ALL apparently been saying it wrong for nearly four decades. When Earth was first invaded, they were referred to simply as "Invaders". Then, when their swarm-based intelligence became known they were individually referred to as "Invader Bit", which was then abbreviated to "INVIT". So apparently it's meant to be written "Invit", not "Inbit".


Not sure if Tatsunoko is waiting for 2023 to roll this one out on the 40th anniversary of MOSPEADA or what. No indication is given as to whether it'll be a TV anime, an OVA, ONA, light novel, manga, etc. (I'm inclined to suspect it won't be a TV anime, given how poorly Tatsunoko's last mecha anime outing went... The Price of Smiles was nearly a Southern Cross-level disaster when it came out on the studio's 55th anniversary.
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Re: The EBSIS

Unread post by ShadowLogan »

ESalter wrote:
Warshield73 wrote:The RDF gave them a prototype submersible carrier...

The RDF sold them a prototype submersible carrier "[a]s part of a diplomatic overture"...which obviously failed due, presumably, to the Soviet's inherent treachery.
Warshield73 wrote:...and they worked with them in Africa...

No, they worked against them in Africa, supporting anti-RDF governments.

Re: prototype sub-carrier
The Sale occurred in 2008 to the Soviets (pg31 1E "RDF Manual", 6th Printing), however the EBSIS as an autonomous entity was not declared until July 2014 (pg25). The 1E RPG does sort of work with the premise that nations where not absorbed into the UEDC/UEG, but rather the UEDC/UEG was some type of organization like the UN or NATO (not the best analogy) that had a political body and a military force(s) dedicated to defense of Earth from aliens.

Re: Africa
It's a bit complicated. While 1E Bk 7's adventure module sets them up as a hostile power (IIRC) this is a revised position from what was in 1E Bk 4 "Armies of the Southern Cross" (pg71) when it discussed historical progression of the EBSIS's Africa campaign where it is established they issued a plea for help (and it took combined might of the EBSIS + RDF + ASC) to deal with a hostile Zentreadi presence.

Seto wrote:While this is true, it doesn't really get one away from the war(s)... there were brief lulls in armed hostilities in the timeline, but those were always overshadowed by the consequences of the wars and the threat of further violence. That's why EBSIS was a thing in 1e: war was all there was in the Robotech setting so the best they could do for adventure hooks was someone else to fight.

The EBSIS, even in the 1E timeline, did not engage in open warfare with the RDF or ASC (and at least once was an ally), that doesn't mean minor skirmishes couldn't happen. The 1E though did not have the EBSIS as the lone independent state (York, Quebec, Merchant Republic), but what I think the EBSIS provided was a believable counterweight to the UEG so they couldn't just roll in for a take over (really York and Quebec are so small the RDF or ASC could roll right in, but the EBSIS is so powerful that doesn't seem likely).

The EBSIS (and other independent states) though also provides someone for the UEG to spy on or other clandestine options that do not fall under the heading of a declared war.

Spoiler:
[quote=Seto"]...The BREAKERS are equipped with a prototype Dark Ride Armor - what Robotech would call a "Shadow Cyclone" -[/quote]
Doesn't Robotech already have Shadow Cyclones in the old Invasion Videogame (or is that a VG only thing)? At least in terms of paint jobs I know some people have suggested that Shadow/Dark Cyclone/Mospeadas exist in the animation operated by Sue Grahm (VR-038) and a unit of VR-052, though I think they are just painted to match the new color theme of the UEEF/Mars Mecha.
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Re: The EBSIS

Unread post by Seto Kaiba »

ShadowLogan wrote:Re: prototype sub-carrier
The 1E RPG does sort of work with the premise that nations where not absorbed into the UEDC/UEG, but rather the UEDC/UEG was some type of organization like the UN or NATO (not the best analogy) that had a political body and a military force(s) dedicated to defense of Earth from aliens.

Which, in and of itself, is a pretty solid example of the kind of critical research failure that led Harmony Gold to disown RT1e, insist on editorial oversight over RT2e, and flatly reject the inclusion of any of Palladium's "original" inclusions like EBSIS.

Imagine repeatedly hearing reference to an organization like "United Earth Government" and leaping right to "Earth isn't united and its government doesn't govern". :roll:


ShadowLogan wrote:Re: Africa
It's a bit complicated. While 1E Bk 7's adventure module sets them up as a hostile power (IIRC) this is a revised position from what was in 1E Bk 4 "Armies of the Southern Cross" (pg71) when it discussed historical progression of the EBSIS's Africa campaign where it is established they issued a plea for help (and it took combined might of the EBSIS + RDF + ASC) to deal with a hostile Zentreadi presence.

To be frank, that's pretty much on-brand for your standard issue Evil Soviets in any setting where a Bigger Fish exists. Play nice until outside help is no longer needed then immediately resume hostile military posturing or, for bonus points, set up a double-cross under the guise of teamwork.


ShadowLogan wrote:The EBSIS, even in the 1E timeline, did not engage in open warfare with the RDF or ASC (and at least once was an ally), that doesn't mean minor skirmishes couldn't happen. The 1E though did not have the EBSIS as the lone independent state (York, Quebec, Merchant Republic), but what I think the EBSIS provided was a believable counterweight to the UEG so they couldn't just roll in for a take over (really York and Quebec are so small the RDF or ASC could roll right in, but the EBSIS is so powerful that doesn't seem likely).

As others have noted, EBSIS was on a pretty consistently hostile footing though... to the point of launching unprovoked surprise attacks on the UEG. So my point still stands... that's "the threat of further violence" mentioned previously.


Spoiler:
ShadowLogan wrote:
Seto wrote:...The BREAKERS are equipped with a prototype Dark Ride Armor - what Robotech would call a "Shadow Cyclone" -

Doesn't Robotech already have Shadow Cyclones in the old Invasion Videogame (or is that a VG only thing)? At least in terms of paint jobs I know some people have suggested that Shadow/Dark Cyclone/Mospeadas exist in the animation operated by Sue Grahm (VR-038) and a unit of VR-052, though I think they are just painted to match the new color theme of the UEEF/Mars Mecha.

Well... yes and no?

While the fact wasn't directly acknowledged in the dialog of the original Genesis Climber MOSPEADA, the Ride Armor that Shinobu Takeuchi (RT: Sue Graham) was using in her only appearance in MOSPEADA Ep.23 has occasionally been indicated to be a Dark version of the VR-038L Bartley. In the original show, the "Dark" stealth conversion was applied to new and existing hardware. The model used by the BREAKERS is talked up as the "latest model Dark Ride Armor" in development that was being prototyped for introduction in the 3rd Descent Operation, so it's presumably a new type of Ride Armor that may or may not have actually been deployed to the troops involved in the 3rd Descent Operation (since they were offscreen anyway, it hardly matters).

I don't recall Robotech ever identifying Sue Graham's Bartley as a "Shadow Cyclone" though. I believe it's always treated the idea of a "Shadow Cyclone" as a new model and not something that was retrofitted into existing models. Both Robotech: Invasion and Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles took that approach with the idea. Invasion had one called the VR-101P "Shadow Dancer" that combined features of a couple other models from the game, and of course Shadow Chronicles had the VR-057 "Super Cyclone" which looked to be a lightly upgraded VR-052. As far as I can recall, none of the mecha or events from Invasion have been referenced in other works so the "Shadow Dancer" may not be canon and Vince Grant's Super Cyclone seems to be either a prototype or rare new model since his was the only one ever seen.
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Re: The EBSIS

Unread post by xunk16 »

Seto Kaiba wrote:
ShadowLogan wrote:Re: prototype sub-carrier
The 1E RPG does sort of work with the premise that nations where not absorbed into the UEDC/UEG, but rather the UEDC/UEG was some type of organization like the UN or NATO (not the best analogy) that had a political body and a military force(s) dedicated to defense of Earth from aliens.

Which, in and of itself, is a pretty solid example of the kind of critical research failure that led Harmony Gold to disown RT1e, insist on editorial oversight over RT2e, and flatly reject the inclusion of any of Palladium's "original" inclusions like EBSIS.

Imagine repeatedly hearing reference to an organization like "United Earth Government" and leaping right to "Earth isn't united and its government doesn't govern". :roll:


Kinda make sense though, since the whole economical and societal collapse... A United Earth Government would be harder to maintain with diminished logistics in transports, communications, and random rebel zentraedi groups throwing a tantrum in important infrastructure from time to time. I still find it likely that, nations which would have been hit hard by the first UEG's taxation efforts, would be very unconvinced once under the control of the ASC. All this is more or less a transference of power. First the "almost U.N. / Nato" stole as much authority as they could and enforced it. It lead to the Rain of Death. Then a big part of said UEG left, so remaining / rebuilding local governments started to have dreams for their own future once again.
The transition wasn't an easy and joyful one to begin with, considering the GCW and Anti-Unification wars. So I feel it makes more sense that a balkanization would happen, once some of the production chain would be restored by local entities.

Because for all its vaunted speed in rebuilding, the ASC and UEG would still have to target some communities first. Those in the periphery would eventually resent the delays. Once you do rebuild yourself faster alone, you kinda feel entitled to what you do have.
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Re: The EBSIS

Unread post by Sambot »

A few things.
The EBSIS supporting bandits.

Are they supporting bandits or freedom fighters? One nations bandit is another's freedom fighter. And who's to say the UEG didn't also support bandits and freedom fighters? Want to avoid international problems? Sent in a third party.



The series only being about humans fighting aliens.

What about the Global War at the beginning of Macross and in episode 27? The humans forcing the UEG troops out of that one city? ATAC fighting TASC? Sympathizer towns ambushing soldiers? Biker gangs fighting each other? Seems to me like here's lots of humans fighting humans going in in the series. And if we go beyond the series there's Edward's civil war with the REF.

If there's a United Earth Government, how can there be an EBSIS?

There's a United Nations now. There's also 195 nations on Earth. Each with their own laws, along with currency exchange rates, open conflict in places, countries sanctioning others, others wanting independence. How united is the United Nations? Why should the United Earth Government be any different?

The PCs serve no purpose.

How do we know they don't? How do we know a PC didn't miss a communications skill check and turn the SDF-1's internal broadcast system to external broadcast which the Zentraedi then tuned in on?
Or that the PC's battle couldn't be the turning point in a war? Their valiant stand made sure the main force wasn't overrun. Bob fights off a squad of Battle Pods that would have hit Rick from behind? It was their Destroids that provided the distraction the defectors needed to get away? How do we know that Suzy didn't hire the PCs to see if her husband was cheating on her with one of the Miss Macross Contestants? Or that a plot to fix the contest wasn't averted by the PCs? That the PCs were assigned to escort rancher Dan's cattle to to the Monument City stockyards? Or that Yellow Dancer wasn't the only musical spy? We don't. That leaves a lot of room for role playing.
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Re: The EBSIS

Unread post by Warshield73 »

Seto Kaiba wrote:
ShadowLogan wrote:Re: prototype sub-carrier
The 1E RPG does sort of work with the premise that nations where not absorbed into the UEDC/UEG, but rather the UEDC/UEG was some type of organization like the UN or NATO (not the best analogy) that had a political body and a military force(s) dedicated to defense of Earth from aliens.

Which, in and of itself, is a pretty solid example of the kind of critical research failure that led Harmony Gold to disown RT1e, insist on editorial oversight over RT2e, and flatly reject the inclusion of any of Palladium's "original" inclusions like EBSIS.

I don't keep up on Robotech that much but I seem to remember that in addition to disowning Palladium Books 1e they also disowned a 20+ novel series, comics, and a ton of there own materials. You could almost say that in the '90's HG just throw licensed material out into the world with few instructions for the purpose of making money.

xunk16 wrote:
Seto Kaiba wrote:
ShadowLogan wrote:Re: prototype sub-carrier
The 1E RPG does sort of work with the premise that nations where not absorbed into the UEDC/UEG, but rather the UEDC/UEG was some type of organization like the UN or NATO (not the best analogy) that had a political body and a military force(s) dedicated to defense of Earth from aliens.

Which, in and of itself, is a pretty solid example of the kind of critical research failure that led Harmony Gold to disown RT1e, insist on editorial oversight over RT2e, and flatly reject the inclusion of any of Palladium's "original" inclusions like EBSIS.

Imagine repeatedly hearing reference to an organization like "United Earth Government" and leaping right to "Earth isn't united and its government doesn't govern". :roll:


Kinda make sense though, since the whole economical and societal collapse... A United Earth Government would be harder to maintain with diminished logistics in transports, communications, and random rebel zentraedi groups throwing a tantrum in important infrastructure from time to time. I still find it likely that, nations which would have been hit hard by the first UEG's taxation efforts, would be very unconvinced once under the control of the ASC. All this is more or less a transference of power. First the "almost U.N. / Nato" stole as much authority as they could and enforced it. It lead to the Rain of Death. Then a big part of said UEG left, so remaining / rebuilding local governments started to have dreams for their own future once again.
The transition wasn't an easy and joyful one to begin with, considering the GCW and Anti-Unification wars. So I feel it makes more sense that a balkanization would happen, once some of the production chain would be restored by local entities.

Because for all its vaunted speed in rebuilding, the ASC and UEG would still have to target some communities first. Those in the periphery would eventually resent the delays. Once you do rebuild yourself faster alone, you kinda feel entitled to what you do have.

I think what you have to remember is HG is telling a very small scale story where as PB has to create a world that you can adventure in. Like most media properties when you go to develop your IP into other media it has to be expanded.

Again, I go back to the old West End Star Wars. When they started there was just 2 movies and few novelizations so they had to create everything. It is amazing today how much of canon Star Wars comes from those books but they did it just to create a galaxy you could adventure in. PB had to do the same for Robotech otherwise it gets pretty boring pretty quickly in an RPG setting. Is EBSIS a terribly imaginative secondary antagonists? No. Is it some horrible destruction of Robotech,IMO no.
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Re: The EBSIS

Unread post by Seto Kaiba »

xunk16 wrote:Kinda make sense though, since the whole economical and societal collapse... A United Earth Government would be harder to maintain with diminished logistics in transports, communications, and random rebel zentraedi groups throwing a tantrum in important infrastructure from time to time.

Not in actual Robotech, no. The United Earth Government would be governing on Easy Mode since the entire population of Earth now fits neatly into a handful of medium-sized towns all clustered around the SDF-1's landing site in Alaska, making it easy for the military to maintain communications infrastructure and manage distribution of essential supplies like food, clean water, and medicine to the citizenry.

This, of course, being why HG banned the inclusion of EBSIS and factions like it from the RPG. It's just ridiculous on the face of it.


xunk16 wrote:I still find it likely that, nations which would have been hit hard by the first UEG's taxation efforts, would be very unconvinced once under the control of the ASC. All this is more or less a transference of power. First the "almost U.N. / Nato" stole as much authority as they could and enforced it. It lead to the Rain of Death. Then a big part of said UEG left, so remaining / rebuilding local governments started to have dreams for their own future once again.

Kind of a non-issue, since there weren't any nations left when the Zentradi got done with Earth and nobody was going to argue with the United Earth Government afterwards because everyone on Earth was dependent on the UEDF for distribution of daily necessities like food, clean water, medicine housing, etc. Without the UEG, the only real option is to wander out into the desolation and die slowly of exposure.

The United Earth Government didn't "steal" any authority. It was given the authority it had by the mutual consent of the nations of Earth who united to form it. It had essentially no role in the Rain of Death, because the Zentradi were utterly uninterested in negotiation of any kind and no amount of preparation would have overcome their overwhelming numerical superiority. No part of the UEG left, unless you could "being vaporized" as leaving, and the local governments established thereafter were dependent on the UEG for basically everything.


xunk16 wrote:The transition wasn't an easy and joyful one to begin with, considering the GCW and Anti-Unification wars. So I feel it makes more sense that a balkanization would happen, once some of the production chain would be restored by local entities.

There's no such event as the "Anti-Unification Wars" in Robotech.





Sambot wrote:Are they supporting bandits or freedom fighters? One nations bandit is another's freedom fighter. And who's to say the UEG didn't also support bandits and freedom fighters? Want to avoid international problems? Sent in a third party.

The dichotomy you were looking for was "terrorist or freedom fighter". Bandits are just thieves, and while government-sponsored acts of piracy are a thing such agreements are less support and more "we promise not to kill you as long as you target our enemy instead". Mind you, the idea doesn't quite work regardless because EBSIS and the other non-canon rival powers inserted into RT1e are very blatantly the greater evil.

Bandit (Noun): a robber or outlaw belonging to a gang and typically operating in an isolated or lawless area.



Sambot wrote:What about the Global War at the beginning of Macross and in episode 27?

Episode 33, actually... but not enough detail there to go on, and canon Robotech even goes so far as to suggest the whole Anti-Unification League is a false flag operation carried out by the UEDF to justify its military spending before the aliens rolled up. The rest of what you had here was getting rather unbelievably broad with the definition of "fight"...


Sambot wrote:There's a United Nations now. There's also 195 nations on Earth. Each with their own laws, along with currency exchange rates, open conflict in places, countries sanctioning others, others wanting independence. How united is the United Nations? Why should the United Earth Government be any different?

The United Nations is not a government. It is an intergovernmental diplomatic organization with little-to-no actual power.

The United Earth Government, on the other hand, was a supranational government formed and empowered by the mutual consent of the world's nations. Robotech is pretty damned clear that it really was United Earth, admittedly one where lofty ideals of brotherhood were motivated by a tangible external threat rather than simply the better angels of man's nature prevailing.

You're making an applies and oranges comparison here.


Sambot wrote:How do we know they don't? How do we know a PC didn't miss a communications skill check and turn the SDF-1's internal broadcast system to external broadcast which the Zentraedi then tuned in on?
Or that the PC's battle couldn't be the turning point in a war? Their valiant stand made sure the main force wasn't overrun. Bob fights off a squad of Battle Pods that would have hit Rick from behind? It was their Destroids that provided the distraction the defectors needed to get away? How do we know that Suzy didn't hire the PCs to see if her husband was cheating on her with one of the Miss Macross Contestants? Or that a plot to fix the contest wasn't averted by the PCs? That the PCs were assigned to escort rancher Dan's cattle to to the Monument City stockyards? Or that Yellow Dancer wasn't the only musical spy? We don't. That leaves a lot of room for role playing.

At that point, the player characters aren't the heroes of their own story... they're background characters in someone else's. That's not really fodder for a compelling story most of the time. Rather like having an overbearing GMPNC railroading things.
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Re: The EBSIS

Unread post by Seto Kaiba »

Warshield73 wrote:I don't keep up on Robotech that much but I seem to remember that in addition to disowning Palladium Books 1e they also disowned a 20+ novel series, comics, and a ton of there own materials. You could almost say that in the '90's HG just throw licensed material out into the world with few instructions for the purpose of making money.

Your memory is good... they disowned effectively everything made by licensees prior to 2000. All the novels, all the comics published by Comico, Eternity/Malibu, Academy, and Antarctic Press, all the 1st Edition RPG books, even the setting materials in Robotech Art 1 and Robotech Art 3 got broomed.

Their primary reason for doing so being very much what you say there... that, as they put it, "nobody was minding the store" and licensees were doing whatever the hell they wanted without any kind of creative oversight, editorial review, or quality control from Harmony Gold. They had given up on Robotech after the twofold failure of Sentinels and Untold Story and selling licenses to any interested party willing to write a sufficiently (not very) large check. They didn't start giving a damn again until around 1998 when they revoked Antarctic Press's license and started attempting to ramp up for a revival of the animated series with Robotech 3000 (which bombed) and then a hard reboot of the entire franchise.


Warshield73 wrote:Again, I go back to the old West End Star Wars. When they started there was just 2 movies and few novelizations so they had to create everything. It is amazing today how much of canon Star Wars comes from those books but they did it just to create a galaxy you could adventure in. PB had to do the same for Robotech otherwise it gets pretty boring pretty quickly in an RPG setting. Is EBSIS a terribly imaginative secondary antagonists? No. Is it some horrible destruction of Robotech,IMO no.

Granted, that's true... they had to do something to make the Robotech setting seem bigger to give players something to do. The problem with EBSIS, as elaborated on at tedious length on the previous page, is that it makes no logical sense as a faction politically, socially, or chronologically. Kevin just reached for the lowest-hanging fruit.
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Re: The EBSIS

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Seto wrote:Which, in and of itself, is a pretty solid example of the kind of critical research failure that led Harmony Gold to disown RT1e, insist on editorial oversight over RT2e, and flatly reject the inclusion of any of Palladium's "original" inclusions like EBSIS.

Imagine repeatedly hearing reference to an organization like "United Earth Government" and leaping right to "Earth isn't united and its government doesn't govern"

When it comes to the older licenses like 1E RPG or the Novels I think a better way to look at it than if it's consistent with the modern 85Ep take (or even for the time) is if the license is internally consistent with itself given HG's approach to the license in that period. As I've said in the past, for all practical purposes these amount to their own self contained universes (especially given some of the timeline "clarifications" HG didn't make until 2001-ish).

In that case I think they do make "sense", at least going by the 1E RPG timeline for the period found in Bk2 (pg24-6). The EBSIS and other Independent States did not really appear until 2014 after the RDF was severely weakened by the loss of the SDF-1 in 2013 and the formation of a the new UEG around the same time. We do not know the political structure of the UEG either in 2013 or back in 2001 with the first incarnation. The 2001 is important since it might explain the sale in 2008 that the EBSIS inherited, and it might explain the 2013 "refuse to join". The 1E RPG also had 30% of the world's population surviving (that's 300million people per billion).

The UEG might make for an less than truthful statement in its naming, I agree but is that really any different than the United States of America (the US has territories that are not states, then there is the Native American Reserve/Nation system, plus the US is not the only national level govt. in America).

Seto wrote:As others have noted, EBSIS was on a pretty consistently hostile footing though... to the point of launching unprovoked surprise attacks on the UEG. So my point still stands... that's "the threat of further violence" mentioned previously.

I agree the EBSIS was on frenemy hostile footing with the UEG, but neither actually engaged in a Full-scale war with each other. At best we have lots of minor skirmishes (player encounters) or via proxies (bandits, Zentreadi).
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Re: The EBSIS

Unread post by Seto Kaiba »

ShadowLogan wrote:When it comes to the older licenses like 1E RPG or the Novels I think a better way to look at it than if it's consistent with the modern 85Ep take (or even for the time) is if the license is internally consistent with itself given HG's approach to the license in that period.

No offense, but that's just an incredibly blatant attempt to assert that those old licensed works should be exempt from any critical evaluation by insisting each and every one of them should be the sole occupant of its own special category.

In objective terms, these are licensed works based on the Robotech TV series and they should be judged as such. That's what Harmony Gold did. I see no rational justification for us to do otherwise. Especially as the licensees who made these materials did not set out to make their own original takes on the Robotech setting. They just did a poor job building on the Robotech official setting at the time. Whether it was because they were flying blind, rushed, lazy, or simply incompetent, it doesn't matter. What matters is that these licensees were supposed to be building on the TV series and, for whatever reason, they failed so miserably at it that despite it all having been non-canon from the word "go" Harmony Gold publicly disowned as "Robotech in name only" as soon as they actually started looking at it properly.


ShadowLogan wrote:As I've said in the past, for all practical purposes these amount to their own self contained universes [...]

No, for all practical purposes these are simply failures of the creative process and not a part of any universe.

Fans of these disowned works sometimes posit that they could be alternate universes, but fanon's all that is.

Officially, Robotech doesn't have any alternate universe settings. There's just "canon" and "non". We'll never know if Harmony Gold's policy would've changed due to Titan Comics' plans for their widely mocked comic series due to its (long overdue) silent cancellation and abandonment early last year, but even that only acknowledged Titan's comic and the various failed animated sequels.


ShadowLogan wrote:In that case I think they do make "sense", at least going by the 1E RPG timeline for the period found in Bk2 (pg24-6). The EBSIS and other Independent States did not really appear until 2014 after the RDF was severely weakened by the loss of the SDF-1 in 2013 and the formation of a the new UEG around the same time.

Not really, no... because at that point in time we know that UEG was the only government in town (literally) and that everyone or practically everyone was dependent on the military for things like food.

There's no way for a rival government to form when breaking away from the only existing government means starvation.
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Re: The EBSIS

Unread post by Warshield73 »

Seto Kaiba wrote:
ShadowLogan wrote:When it comes to the older licenses like 1E RPG or the Novels I think a better way to look at it than if it's consistent with the modern 85Ep take (or even for the time) is if the license is internally consistent with itself given HG's approach to the license in that period.

No offense, but that's just an incredibly blatant attempt to assert that those old licensed works should be exempt from any critical evaluation by insisting each and every one of them should be the sole occupant of its own special category.

How is judging something in its historical context trying to exempt it from criticism? You make it sound as if HG had piles of world building that PB and other license holders simply ignored. This was a cannibalized series that on a good day only makes sense if you're on shrooms and PB had to make a world out of it.

HG gave almost no direction to this series for PB, Kevin frequently tells the story about having to pay for Japanese translations for original work, this is important context when evaluating the work.

If HG had laid out a whole world for PB and Kevin just ignored them that would be important context as well but that didn't happen.

Seto Kaiba wrote:In objective terms, these are licensed works based on the Robotech TV series and they should be judged as such. That's what Harmony Gold did. I see no rational justification for us to do otherwise. Especially as the licensees who made these materials did not set out to make their own original takes on the Robotech setting. They just did a poor job building on the Robotech official setting at the time. Whether it was because they were flying blind, rushed, lazy, or simply incompetent, it doesn't matter. What matters is that these licensees were supposed to be building on the TV series and, for whatever reason, they failed so miserably at it that despite it all having been non-canon from the word "go" Harmony Gold publicly disowned as "Robotech in name only" as soon as they actually started looking at it properly.

First, a judgement on creative works is always going to be subjective. You can wrap an opinion in the word objective doesn't transform it into fact.

Second, there is no evidence that HG did any kind of evaluation of licensed properties. They created a huge mess by pimping out there IP to anyone that would pay and then when they finally decided to try and do something with it again (Shadow Chronicles and the failed sequels) they just wiped it all away. I am not saying that is a bad thing, much like with Star Wars it was just easier to wipe everything away and then include what you want but this was not some process based on a critical evaluation of the works.

Finally, I get it you don't like what PB did in 1e, that's your oppinion. I like it, so do many others. I prefer the McKinney novels to the series (the singing makes me want to put a gun to my head) but I know I am in an extreme minority there. You think EBSIS and other such creations are lazy or incompetent, I get that I feel the same way about the UEG. Don't want to come up with actual world political system just make it a world government. It is the essence of lazy and I don't just say that about Robotech, it has always been my chief complaint about Star Trek for instance? All the humans are in the federation, all the klingons are in there empire, all the romulans in there empire, and so on and so on.

In a TV series you can get away with that because you only tell the stories you want but the second you create a TTRPG where the players can go anywhere and do anything it becomes toxically boring, IMO. A TTRPG needs more of a world than the animated series could provide so something had to be added. If your complaint is that you don't like what they added that is a perfectly valid opinion. If on the other hand you are upset that they added anything at all that's not reasonable at all. PB was paying for a license and needed to publish books to make it worth it and the series provided maybe enough material for 4 very short books.

Seto Kaiba wrote:
ShadowLogan wrote:As I've said in the past, for all practical purposes these amount to their own self contained universes [...]

No, for all practical purposes these are simply failures of the creative process and not a part of any universe.

Fans of these disowned works sometimes posit that they could be alternate universes, but fanon's all that is.

Officially, Robotech doesn't have any alternate universe settings. There's just "canon" and "non". We'll never know if Harmony Gold's policy would've changed due to Titan Comics' plans for their widely mocked comic series due to its (long overdue) silent cancellation and abandonment early last year, but even that only acknowledged Titan's comic and the various failed animated sequels.

These are written works that were officially licensed by HG and allowed to exist for years so yes they are there own self contained universe. Star Wars can relegate all the old books to "Legends" but they still exist and make a self contained universe. HG can simply disown everything they allowed but it still exists. It's not an official alternate universe, just like Legends isn't for SW, but it is its own self contained universe.

I am also curious as to how you define "failures of the creative process"? These works have there fans and there detractors but not sure how that is failure.

Seto Kaiba wrote:
ShadowLogan wrote:In that case I think they do make "sense", at least going by the 1E RPG timeline for the period found in Bk2 (pg24-6). The EBSIS and other Independent States did not really appear until 2014 after the RDF was severely weakened by the loss of the SDF-1 in 2013 and the formation of a the new UEG around the same time.

Not really, no... because at that point in time we know that UEG was the only government in town (literally) and that everyone or practically everyone was dependent on the military for things like food.

There's no way for a rival government to form when breaking away from the only existing government means starvation.

And how do we know this. I watched the entire Robotech series a few years ago and there is almost nothing about the larger world. I know because that was the information I was looking for to try and run my games.

But, assume this was clearly stated it doesn't change the fact that PB needed to create a wider world for adventuring and to quote one of my favorite Youtubers World Governments are Boring . The idea that a world government could hold on to global power after allowing most of the world to be annihilated is laughable. There are going to be nationalist uprising, religious revivals and even just political opportunism.

Simple fact is the PB 1e and even the McKinney novels provided a more complete world to adventure in than the series did.
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Re: The EBSIS

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Seto wrote:No offense, but that's just an incredibly blatant attempt to assert that those old licensed works should be exempt from any critical evaluation by insisting each and every one of them should be the sole occupant of its own special category.

I do not oppose critical evaluation of the material. I agree that in some aspects of the 1E RPG (and novels) could have been better than what we got.

But to say that every incarnation of a licensed property has to be 100% faithful to the original material is just a laughable expectation:
-Star Wars EP4 and EP6 both have scenes in their novelizations that did not make the cut to the final film (either the SE in 97 or w/prequel integration cut or original to release)
-The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Series) has differences between the Novelization (and further to it's audio book form in the series), the BBC series, the Hollywood Movie, and I would not be surprised to changes between other incarnations like its radio format
-GI Joe has differences between its original comic book run by Hama and the Sunbow Series (never mind later works like the LA movies)
-Transformers is similar to GI Joe in that its original comic book run by Marvel (and Marvel UK) are different than the TV animation (never mind later works)
-Masters of the Universe, the toyline had its own mythos separate from the TV cartoon and the LA Movie in '87
-differences between Anime and Manga and LA adaptions of the same story in Japan
-Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (just comparing the adaptations of the 80/90s between the comic, cartoon, and LA movies of the time)
-then you have Marvel and DC Superheroes with their alternate timelines in comic form, distinct takes in TV (cartoon/LA forms) and movies over the past 70+ years of history
-The "M.A.N.T.I.S" TV show in the 90s (on Fox, Superhero category) was based on a comic book series, but even they did changes when they adapted it to the small screen.
-"The Tick" would be another its been adapted as a Cartoon, a FOX LA TV show, an an Amazon Prime LA Show, each with their own different take on the characters
-Arthur C. Clarke's Odyssey Series, there are distinct differences between the Movie adaptation and the Novelization (though when doing subsequent Novelizations he based it on the Movie adaptation instead of the previous book).

So what makes Robotech so special that we should expect a 100% faithful reproduction when it changes medium? Especially given the list above, and I suspect people can add to it, it would seem a laughable expectation for a 100% faithful reproduction, especially given the time frame the 1E/Novels come from.

Seto wrote:Not really, no... because at that point in time we know that UEG was the only government in town (literally) and that everyone or practically everyone was dependent on the military for things like food.

That is in the Yune-verse, in the 1E RPG that is not exactly the case BK 2 pg25 "The RDF does what it can to help the survivors of the global holocaust". The phrase "what it can to help" suggests that it is not the only game in town and the RDF appears to be running the shots from 2011-4 and not the UEG. The entry on pg28 about the EBSIS even supports this because it was the Scandinavian area that European refugees fled to (and overwhelmed) and offered support, not the RDF and that was one of the regions that did not join the new UEG. I will point out that the 1E RPG also allows for 30% of the worlds population to survive and not just the SDF-1/Macross City.

I think its important to remember that we do not know, now or then, how the UEG is structured below the top level. From a management perspective the UEG likely organizes some type of State/Provincial System (which if any successfully succeeded would be a new nation) and most likely organized into smaller and smaller regions further (County and Community). Each of these sub-entity regions is going to have its own set of available resources. In 1E RPG terms the UEG had loosely kept the old national boarders in place at some level by the text even by 2014. Those regions in the 1E RPG could in theory secede especially if they where essentially self-sufficient OR had something to trade with the UEG or other secessionists (York and Quebec trade with each other IIRC).
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Re: The EBSIS

Unread post by ESalter »

Warshield73 wrote:The idea that a world government could hold on to global power after allowing most of the world to be annihilated is laughable. There are going to be nationalist uprising...

Why? The United Earth Government was formed against the threat of alien attack. That threat's even more apparent after the Robotech War.

Warshield73 wrote:...religious revivals...

Why would a religious revival be a threat to the United Earth Government?

Warshield73 wrote:...and even just political opportunism.

Individual leaders might be sacked after the Zentradi attack, and the UEG might be reorganized, but neither is a threat to the concept of world government itself. We know this, because the United Earth Government is still being mentioned after the First Robotech War.

Warshield73 wrote:Simple fact is the PB 1e and even the McKinney novels provided a more complete world to adventure in than the series did.

I've got to say, I've long thought the opposite, WRT the novels. The RPG, of course, usually tried to keep enemies around as long as possible, even to the extent of having the Invid come back again after leaving. But Luceno and Daily tended to kill anyone the narrative is done with.
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Re: The EBSIS

Unread post by drewkitty ~..~ »

ESalter wrote:
Warshield73 wrote:Simple fact is the PB 1e and even the McKinney novels provided a more complete world to adventure in than the series did.

I've got to say, I've long thought the opposite, WRT the novels. The RPG, of course, usually tried to keep enemies around as long as possible, even to the extent of having the Invid come back again after leaving. But Luceno and Daily tended to kill anyone the narrative is done with.


I agree with WS on this.
He wasn't talking about the Characters. But about the World the characters inhabit. It is all the details about that world that are in some sense more interesting than the characters that inhabit it. All those nice details that got vacuumed out of the setting with the new ed, making the new ed all that much more banal and monochrome.

Yes the RPG will try to keep around the Badies the people know from the series. This is so they don't have to reinvent new ones for the gamebooks.

Yes, the novels will tend to drop people out of the narrative once their story arch is done. It is just the nature of story writing.
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Re: The EBSIS

Unread post by Seto Kaiba »

Warshield73 wrote:How is judging something in its historical context trying to exempt it from criticism?

Go back and read what I quoted... because that not only isn't what he suggested, it's the opposite of what he suggested.

I'm the one saying that they SHOULD be judged in context as licensed works based on the canon at the time. He's advocating for segregating each licensed work and judging them separately out of its historical and production context, purely on the basis of how consistent they are with themselves and only themselves... which is an attempt to issue them a "get out of jail free" card for being licensed works that barely resemble the source material.


Warshield73 wrote:You make it sound as if HG had piles of world building that PB and other license holders simply ignored.

At no point did I say or imply that, so that one is purely on you.


Warshield73 wrote:HG gave almost no direction to this series for PB, Kevin frequently tells the story about having to pay for Japanese translations for original work, this is important context when evaluating the work.

Yes, we know... and that would be a perfectly valid excuse if the RPG were sparsely-written or had the occasional error. That doesn't excuse the RPG departing from the setting of the TV series that it's based on to such a degree that it outright contradicts the show's setting.


Warshield73 wrote:First, a judgement on creative works is always going to be subjective. You can wrap an opinion in the word objective doesn't transform it into fact.

... I get the distinct feeling you rushed to object with such haste that you didn't actually read my post or ShadowLogan's properly.

It is objectively true that the Robotech role-playing game is a licensed work based on the Robotech animated television series. It is only logical that we judge it on those grounds, especially since that's the same criteria that Harmony Gold used to evaluate both the 1st and 2nd editions of the game.


Warshield73 wrote:Second, there is no evidence that HG did any kind of evaluation of licensed properties.

Uh... buddy, there's not only "no evidence" that HG didn't do any kind of evaluation, they've flat-out STATED FOR THE RECORD that they didn't. That, incidentally, is a point I made in several previous posts so I'm not sure why you're repeating it back to me like it counters my position here. That lack of creative oversight or editorial review is one of the reasons those licensed works were branded as Robotech-in-name-only and disowned by Harmony Gold... with the strong implication from HG that, if they'd done their job properly, none of those works would've passed muster.


Warshield73 wrote:Finally, I get it you don't like what PB did in 1e, that's your oppinion. I like it, so do many others.

Liking it or not is irrelevant to whether or not it actually fits with the Robotech setting.


Warshield73 wrote:You think EBSIS and other such creations are lazy or incompetent, I get that I feel the same way about the UEG. Don't want to come up with actual world political system just make it a world government. It is the essence of lazy and I don't just say that about Robotech, it has always been my chief complaint about Star Trek for instance? All the humans are in the federation, all the klingons are in there empire, all the romulans in there empire, and so on and so on.

EBSIS was a profoundly lazy, thoughtless inclusion... not just because it fell back on cold war hysteria, but because it contradicted the Robotech setting on multiple levels.

Mind you, the inclusion of a unified government is not something you can even really blame Robotech for. That was part of ALL THREE original shows and it made internal sense with the settings that all three shows had:
  • Macross's Earth Unification Government sprang up in the wake of Alien Starship One's crash on South Ataria island when the world's governments realized they needed to form a united front against the possibility of conflict with the clearly warlike owners of the wrecked alien ship.
  • Southern Cross was set on a recently-colonized planet after a nuclear holocaust forced humanity to abandon Earth. Unity was a necessity of life since Glorie wasn't self-sufficient until shortly before the events of the series, and was dependent on the older colony on Liberte. They were also determined not to repeat the mistakes that left Earth not only uninhabitable by humanity but utterly incapable of supporting life. The Zor, by their own token, were also unified for the same reason: they'd destroyed Glorie in a nuclear holocaust millennia before the series and rearchitected their entire society to prize unity above all else and prevent a recurrence of that kind of tragedy.
  • MOSPEADA, like Macross, featured the unification of a fractious political environment against a common threat: the Invit. The outer solar system colonies put monumental effort into the development of their colonies to accommodate the refugees from Earth and banded together to retake the planet.

(I'd also take this opportunity to point out that, in Star Trek not all humans are in the Federation... that there are human colonies outside of Federation jurisdiction has been canon since TOS and TAS.)


Warshield73 wrote:In a TV series you can get away with that because you only tell the stories you want but the second you create a TTRPG where the players can go anywhere and do anything it becomes toxically boring, IMO. A TTRPG needs more of a world than the animated series could provide so something had to be added. If your complaint is that you don't like what they added that is a perfectly valid opinion. If on the other hand you are upset that they added anything at all that's not reasonable at all. PB was paying for a license and needed to publish books to make it worth it and the series provided maybe enough material for 4 very short books.

To be fair, it's still toxically boring even with Palladium's decidedly non-canon additions... but the sensible thing to do in a situation like that is what animation studios do all the time when they adapt a work that isn't complete yet: they sit down with the creators and get them onboard with developing new content. It's not like HG had anything else do at the time!


Warshield73 wrote:These are written works that were officially licensed by HG and allowed to exist for years so yes they are there own self contained universe. Star Wars can relegate all the old books to "Legends" but they still exist and make a self contained universe. HG can simply disown everything they allowed but it still exists. It's not an official alternate universe, just like Legends isn't for SW, but it is its own self contained universe.

For one, that's... not how that works.

For two, they're so wildly inconsistent with themselves and each other that there's no rational argument for them being a "self-contained universe".

For three, and the hat trick, no... that a work exists doesn't make it an alternate universe if it's not canon. It's just non-canon. To assert otherwise is just fanon.


Warshield73 wrote:I am also curious as to how you define "failures of the creative process"? These works have there fans and there detractors but not sure how that is failure.

... if you're making a licensed work based on an established setting and your end result not only barely resembles that setting but is so wide of the mark that the license issuer is so horrified that they disown your work entirely? That's a pretty big failure in the creative process.



Seto Kaiba wrote:And how do we know this. I watched the entire Robotech series a few years ago and there is almost nothing about the larger world. I know because that was the information I was looking for to try and run my games.

It comes up several times in the show, most blatantly when Kyle is having his hissy fit over Minmei being paid in food.


Warshield73 wrote:The idea that a world government could hold on to global power after allowing most of the world to be annihilated is laughable. There are going to be nationalist uprising, religious revivals and even just political opportunism.

The idea that a world government formed on the basis of an external threat is going to hold onto power when that threat demonstrates itself in the most concrete way imaginable is pretty plausible... especially when they also control the distribution of food, water, and medicine.






ShadowLogan wrote:I do not oppose critical evaluation of the material. I agree that in some aspects of the 1E RPG (and novels) could have been better than what we got.

But to say that every incarnation of a licensed property has to be 100% faithful to the original material is just a laughable expectation:

... and you completely missed the point.

You've got a list of things which are either non-canon, some intentionally so, or official alternate universes...
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Re: The EBSIS

Unread post by Defender_X »

But to add, having other governments pop up and cause drama is fun. And some third rate government selling knock off mecha to anyone with the cash makes for some good mecha stompy time.
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Re: The EBSIS

Unread post by Seto Kaiba »

Defender_X wrote:But to add, having other governments pop up and cause drama is fun. And some third rate government selling knock off mecha to anyone with the cash makes for some good mecha stompy time.

Well, yeah... the emergence of a rogue nation and the havoc it can cause can be a fun narrative device in a setting where a turn of events like that is actually plausible.

Robotech's setting just isn't conducive to that kind of thing. From the early 2000s, Earth is ruled by a world government and when that's wiped out along with almost the entire population by alien invaders it's replaced by a de facto military autocracy with a monopoly on the essentials of life as well as weapons development and manufacturing. Then that de facto military autocracy gets wiped out by another alien invasion force and there's no government above the level of village mayors and Fist of the North Star-style gang leaders.

There are lots of settings where that kind of thing works... Robotech just isn't one of them.
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Re: The EBSIS

Unread post by Jefffar »

Defender_X wrote:But to add, having other governments pop up and cause drama is fun. And some third rate government selling knock off mecha to anyone with the cash makes for some good mecha stompy time.


Wonderfully so. It provides so much oppourtunity in the between series times.
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Re: The EBSIS

Unread post by Peacebringer »

After the fall of the Zentraedi, there is so much Zentraedi-wreckage, that, why hasn't numerous smaller governments popped up, creating hybrids of Zentraedi-UN mecha? I mean, the Zentraedi's Battlepod PBC should be a staple in every surviving Earth's governments.
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Re: The EBSIS

Unread post by thorr-kan »

Peacebringer wrote:After the fall of the Zentraedi, there is so much Zentraedi-wreckage, that, why hasn't numerous smaller governments popped up, creating hybrids of Zentraedi-UN mecha? I mean, the Zentraedi's Battlepod PBC should be a staple in every surviving Earth's governments.

With the radical change brought on by alien technologies, a lot of the smaller governments have blown up their attempts to jury-rig the wreckage. It turns out a minimum knowledge infrastructure is necessary to support the new technologies. The EBSIS is just the largest and most successful, followed by the Merchant Republic.

Which of course, opens the possibilities of adventures shutting down city-states' attempts to jury-rig alien tech and of adventures where some small or isolated group has managed to jury-rig alien tech. How do they DO that?!
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Re: The EBSIS

Unread post by Seto Kaiba »

Peacebringer wrote:After the fall of the Zentraedi, there is so much Zentraedi-wreckage, that, why hasn't numerous smaller governments popped up, creating hybrids of Zentraedi-UN mecha?

Oh, there's a bunch of reasons.
  1. There aren't enough people.
    In Robotech's TV series, the surviving human populaton after the First Robotech War is less than 100,000 people. As noted in a previous post, you can literally fit the entire human population into a single football stadium with seats left over.
  2. Earth is a wasteland.
    After the First Robotech War, most of Earth is basically uninhabitable. The orbital bombardment wiped out Earth's surface, leaving a sterile desert of dust and impact craters. Areas of surviving vegitation are few, far between, and too sparse to live on sustainably. The oceans and water table are also heavily contaminated with the dust and debris from the bombardment, meaning the water isn't safe to drink either. Trying to go it alone means a slow death from starvation or a marginally faster one from dehydration, if the dust storms don't get you first.
  3. The de facto military government has a monopoly on manufacturing and the distribution of essential supplies.
    Of course, the biggest problem with trying to "go it alone" and create a new city-state or what have you is that rationing is still in effect even at the heart of the new government and the military has complete control over the distribution of little things like food, potable water, medical supplies, and weaponry. If you don't have access to food and clean water, you're going to die. You need the manufacturing capability to build tools, factories, and foundaries to build the essentials of civilization. There's no wood available on 99% of the planet, so you're either building with stone or salvaged metal. You need foundaries with specialized furnaces to recycle scrap metal into usable building materials or make metal tools hard enough to work stone. You need factories with a wide variety of specialized tools to create things like water purifcation and recycling systems, hydroponic or aeroponic farms, synthetic materials to make textiles and other essentials from. Never mind building robotechnology-based weapons. Without that infrastructure - the infrastructure the military has a monopoly on - you're not creating a breakaway state or new government... you're just a tribe of refugee survivalists squatting in the desert for no reason and to the benefit of literally nobody.
  4. Knowledge of, and proficiency with, advanced alien technologies is jealously guarded.
    Unlike in the original Macross, where the study and reverse engineering of advanced alien technologies was undertaken by a substantial international research organization and the advances from that research shared equally around the world and exploited by a huge number of industries who understood how these technologies worked... in Robotech, the knowledge of what makes robotechnology tick is the exclusive province of a double handful of the military's top (and top secret) scientists. Even they don't actually fully understand most of it. Your average civilian after the First Robotech War has about as much chance of being able to successfully salvage and re-engineer an alien war mech as you do... which is to say, "None whatsoever". Because so much about robotechnology is closely guarded military secrets, only that double handful of military scientists like Lang, Zand, Cochrane, etc. have the necessary education and skills to develop new robotechnology-based weapons... and they're living comfortably on the military's payroll.
  5. With the human species teetering on the brink of extinction, the military has no reason to tolerate the existence of a breakaway government.
    Seriously. Trying to break away from the UEG in the postwar period is basically suicide, and humanity's in enough trouble as it is. The military is probably not gonna stand idly by and watch a few dozen morons wander off into the desert to die. If you convince them to let you live out there, you're still dependent on them for basically EVERYTHING, so you're not really forming a new government you just have a town mayor with delusions of grandeur. If you can't convince them, they'll just drag your arse back and send you to the shrink to find out why you're so determined to wander out into the wasteland to die. It's not like a village of survivalist wackjobs can defend themselves against even a single irate Zentradi in his pajamas, let alone a platoon with battle pods. There's a limit to the offensive potential of harsh language. Words can only cause emotional wounds, after all.
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Re: The EBSIS

Unread post by Warshield73 »

Seto Kaiba wrote:
Peacebringer wrote:After the fall of the Zentraedi, there is so much Zentraedi-wreckage, that, why hasn't numerous smaller governments popped up, creating hybrids of Zentraedi-UN mecha?

Oh, there's a bunch of reasons.
  1. There aren't enough people.
    In Robotech's TV series, the surviving human populaton after the First Robotech War is less than 100,000 people. As noted in a previous post, you can literally fit the entire human population into a single football stadium with seats left over.
  2. Earth is a wasteland.
    After the First Robotech War, most of Earth is basically uninhabitable. The orbital bombardment wiped out Earth's surface, leaving a sterile desert of dust and impact craters. Areas of surviving vegitation are few, far between, and too sparse to live on sustainably. The oceans and water table are also heavily contaminated with the dust and debris from the bombardment, meaning the water isn't safe to drink either. Trying to go it alone means a slow death from starvation or a marginally faster one from dehydration, if the dust storms don't get you first.
  3. The de facto military government has a monopoly on manufacturing and the distribution of essential supplies.
    Of course, the biggest problem with trying to "go it alone" and create a new city-state or what have you is that rationing is still in effect even at the heart of the new government and the military has complete control over the distribution of little things like food, potable water, medical supplies, and weaponry. If you don't have access to food and clean water, you're going to die. You need the manufacturing capability to build tools, factories, and foundaries to build the essentials of civilization. There's no wood available on 99% of the planet, so you're either building with stone or salvaged metal. You need foundaries with specialized furnaces to recycle scrap metal into usable building materials or make metal tools hard enough to work stone. You need factories with a wide variety of specialized tools to create things like water purifcation and recycling systems, hydroponic or aeroponic farms, synthetic materials to make textiles and other essentials from. Never mind building robotechnology-based weapons. Without that infrastructure - the infrastructure the military has a monopoly on - you're not creating a breakaway state or new government... you're just a tribe of refugee survivalists squatting in the desert for no reason and to the benefit of literally nobody.
  4. Knowledge of, and proficiency with, advanced alien technologies is jealously guarded.
    Unlike in the original Macross, where the study and reverse engineering of advanced alien technologies was undertaken by a substantial international research organization and the advances from that research shared equally around the world and exploited by a huge number of industries who understood how these technologies worked... in Robotech, the knowledge of what makes robotechnology tick is the exclusive province of a double handful of the military's top (and top secret) scientists. Even they don't actually fully understand most of it. Your average civilian after the First Robotech War has about as much chance of being able to successfully salvage and re-engineer an alien war mech as you do... which is to say, "None whatsoever". Because so much about robotechnology is closely guarded military secrets, only that double handful of military scientists like Lang, Zand, Cochrane, etc. have the necessary education and skills to develop new robotechnology-based weapons... and they're living comfortably on the military's payroll.
  5. With the human species teetering on the brink of extinction, the military has no reason to tolerate the existence of a breakaway government.
    Seriously. Trying to break away from the UEG in the postwar period is basically suicide, and humanity's in enough trouble as it is. The military is probably not gonna stand idly by and watch a few dozen morons wander off into the desert to die. If you convince them to let you live out there, you're still dependent on them for basically EVERYTHING, so you're not really forming a new government you just have a town mayor with delusions of grandeur. If you can't convince them, they'll just drag your arse back and send you to the shrink to find out why you're so determined to wander out into the wasteland to die. It's not like a village of survivalist wackjobs can defend themselves against even a single irate Zentradi in his pajamas, let alone a platoon with battle pods. There's a limit to the offensive potential of harsh language. Words can only cause emotional wounds, after all.

If this is all true, and SK know his Robotech so I am going to assume it is, I am so glad Palladium changed it for the RPG as this sounds like the most boring place to try and run a game. Does that 100k include Zentraedi? How can that few people lead to what we see in Southern Cross and New Genertion/Invid Invasion especially when tens of thousands of humans and most Zentraedi leave for Tirol?

To me this is the Last Jedi problem. You want to drive up the stakes so widdle down the resistance to the people that can fit in the Millennium Falcon or the human population to what can fit into a stadium but then what? OK, everyone is dead now how are you going beat the bad guy.
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Re: The EBSIS

Unread post by Jefffar »

In the RPG it's official that there were several independent polities that existed after the Macross Saga and that several of these were hostile to or engaged in war with the UEG during the 2010s and 2020s.

You can argue against this existing in the show (though I beleive there is enough evidence that we can comortably adjust the number of survivors to a number that ends in '-illions') but you can't argue against it existing the RPG because it's there in black and white.

We are left with the mystery as to where these nations were, what they were called, what form of government they had and what their capabilities were.

The only clues we have are that it took years for the UEG and ASC to suppress them and that a rebel faction in Russia apparently has active Valkyrie fighters available to it in the Shadow Chronicles era.
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Re: The EBSIS

Unread post by Seto Kaiba »

Warshield73 wrote:If this is all true, and SK know his Robotech so I am going to assume it is, I am so glad Palladium changed it for the RPG as this sounds like the most boring place to try and run a game.

Yup... that's why the official Robotech timeline has the period between the Macross Saga's end (2014) and Masters Saga's start (2029) as a nearly-blank space. Nothing of interest happened, or at least nothing canon. (Sentinels is on "broad strokes" continuity officially, so only the barest facts are there.)

Really, that's a problem with almost the entire Robotech timeline though. Outside of the events directly concerning the TV series protagonists, bugger all's going on in all three sagas. The Macross Saga establishes that the Zentradi leave Earth alone after the SDF-1 folds away in episode 3 and don't really bother it besides direct attacks on the SDF-1 until episode 27. All the actual conflict revolves around the SDF-1, so Earth is just sort of cooling its heels with 99.99% of the population completely unaware that there's a war with aliens going on until the bombardment starts. Outside of the antics of the ATAC 15th Squad, most of the story of the Masters Saga is just the Masters and Southern Cross forces staring each other down. The New Generation's the same way, with most of Earth being the "I just want to get on with my life" civilians who don't care about the Mars forces mission, and only Scott's band making any real headway because they almost literally tripped over an Invid Princess out in the middle of nowhere and it's only when Admiral Hunter's forces show up at the very end is there a chance for the mustered surviving ground forces to actually DO something.

As a whole, Robotech really isn't a RPG-friendly setting... that's why 1e and 2e both had to take a lot of (often poorly thought-out) liberties.



Warshield73 wrote:Does that 100k include Zentraedi?

That's just the humans... it's more like 70k, but I rounded up.



Warshield73 wrote:How can that few people lead to what we see in Southern Cross and New Genertion/Invid Invasion especially when tens of thousands of humans and most Zentraedi leave for Tirol?

So, that's actually an artificial problem caused by the fanmade stats for the New Generation stuff.

The planet Southern Cross was set on, Glorie, is a sparsely populated and mostly barren world that was coming out of a nuclear winter, so the only real issue the showrunners had was editing the extra moons out of the sky. The Southern Cross Army was accordingly also quite small, with the entire ATAC having only about 200-300 soldiers to its name (just 15 tank squads).

But those fan "researchers" massively overstated the sizes and crew complements of the UEEF ships and misrepresented their work as OSM to Harmony Gold, which leads to the mistaken impression of the UEEF being a very large organization. Remove those exaggerations and replace them with the animation-accurate numbers from the OSM and the UEEF is suddenly a much more plausible size with there being only about 6,000 soldiers in the entire force Scott arrived with at the start and barely 10,000 in the massed battle in RTSC.


Warshield73 wrote:To me this is the Last Jedi problem. You want to drive up the stakes so widdle down the resistance to the people that can fit in the Millennium Falcon or the human population to what can fit into a stadium but then what? OK, everyone is dead now how are you going beat the bad guy.

... then the bad guy turns out to be one ineffectual old man in an ugly bathrobe who dies anticlimactically and everyone else is left to wonder why they even showed up. :lol:

Admittedly, Robotech's bad guys are a serial DE-escalation. The series started with the billions-strong clone army, then it took a massive step down to a flying nursing home for elderly mad scientists who don't have enough batteries for their doomsday devices, and then again to an occupation force so apathetic they forget to actually oppress anyone after they take over.
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Re: The EBSIS

Unread post by mech798 »

The problem is that within the anime itself, there are tremendously contractidoroy bits of evidence for the zentraadi bombardment.

On the one hand, we have Rick being amazed at flowers growing outside a reclamation zone.

On the other hand, we have Khyron's ship in a jungle.

The first problem is that jungles are not durable environmental structures--to the contrary, they're immensely delicate. The only way an Amazon Jungle survives two years after the bombardment is with a robust ecological backing. Which somehow indicates the Zentraedi managed to miss a part of the world that today, even ignoring major population sites such as cities, has a population in the millions. And again, if the bombardment was as bad as it was portrayed in teh movie--there wouldn't be any jungle, at all, because jungles are less durable than the kind of grasslands you find in the North American zones.

So that's evidence the first for a bombardment not being nearly as devastating as claimed. (Not to mention that Khyron was hiding in it. If there was only a little bit of the Amazon left, well, it would have been examined, especially if Rick is freaking out over some flowers). Doylist answer: The Japanese animators wanted a jungle and a story about giant warriors who freak out over J-pop is probably not going to tip the Hard Science scale very hard.

The second problem (we'll ignore the doylist bit of them being two different shows after Robotech) comes from both SC and New Generation, or their proliferation of cities. In Southern Cross, we know of New Macross and at least two other settlements described as cities. Even if they're small cities, say 20K, that's still over half the survivors, and 20 odd years isn't enough for new reproduction to replace everyone lost, even if some draconian "every woman is always pregnant" policy is followed, which wasn't a problem for Macross because they used cloning, but cloning is never even referenced in Robotechk, outside of the Zentraedi. (that's especially problematic when we see the scenes of people evacuating in various episodes--clearly thousands of civilians, many of them clearly older than the date of the Zentraedi attack).

The problem gets worse in Next Generation, because we find yet another city--Detroit, and yet this is defined as a full scale urban city, complete with skyscrapers, that was evacuated during the second conflict, and either was built (implying a much larger population base) or survived the bombardment (implying a far less intensive bombardment than we got in macross). then there are the trees, most of them obviously old growth trees, which indicates anywhere from twenty to fifty year age, and again, a forest is very hard to build "from scratch" because it's such an integrated ecosystem. (We should note that the various scenes of earth we get in Macross properties don't have much in teh way of forests, they have cities and wastelands, which indicates that in Macross, even though it has a far higher degree of sophistication than Robotech, reforesting earth either proved impossible, or impractical).

And then of course there is New York , which is either a stunning example of bad marksmanship by the Zentreadi--or there were enough people giving on earth, to force them to rebuild a city--and more importantly, forced them to rebuild a city that is largely useful due to it's position on the coast--which indicates other cities that need seaborne trade, a point somewhat reinforced by the existence of patrol boats in New Generation, which would be more or less useless against an alien attack, but would be quite useful to police local shipping.

So in Macross, the only survivors were those on the Macross, those in some of the lunar and L-5 habitats and I believe a very few in underground shelters that survived. Beyond that, the earth was rendered about as lifeless as you could get--which played a major role in the Establishment of the colonization plan.

But in Robotech, the later shows especially indicate that this could not have been the case--there are just too many settlements, too many examples of well-established flora and fauna, and too many people running around who are old enough to be part of the surviving generation, and yet are not part of the military, to the point where we have news media, news conferences, and a fairly big government, instead of the kind of small government you'd naturally get for a few hundred thousand people, most of whom are military. (You know, thinking of that, is there any kind of timeline on when Macross earth did get a civilian government? Gloval was running things for a fair long time, but at some point they did go civilian).

But this doesn't make the EBSIS make any more sense, because it's a bad mishmash of 1980s evil Russians, and people who seem to be attacking for no other reason than to attack. Even if we presume there are independent or semi-independent powers out there, the UEG is the only power out there that has any chance of protecting the earth from everything from renegade Zentreadi to other alien forces. A better argument is that disorder, what there is of it, comes more from a natural annoyance at the government who managed to walk earth into a war that killed 99 percent of the human race.

That's especially true when you consider that in the beginning, the Zentraedi wanted Zor's ship. If they'd gotten it before the contamination had occurred, it's highly likely Breetai would have just left.

It allows for some disorder, some tension, but avoids the, frankly idiotic, idea of trying to have some kind of "cold war" where one side not only had all the advantages, but was the side everyone else was depending on to save the day.

The Real Problem.

But this ultimately is all tangential to the real problem. Palladium came up with the EBSIS because without them... there's not much to do. Robotech is a tremendously barren gaming environment. The big issues are all handled by the main characters (who are not you) and the events are tightly written, not leaving much room for people to do anything other than play the other guys--like Rick Hunter and Scott Bernard only not as cool.

That's why if you look at it, Robotech, from Marcross to Shadow Chronicles, pretty much as the same plot. Aliens show up, Aliens look for some MacGuffin, humans fight the aliens, and either squeak out a victory that only prepares them for the next battle or manage a ruinous draw. Rinse and repeat only with fewer humans at every point.

It's... well it's not very good as a cartoon, but it's absolutely devastating for an RPG. The reason Palladium had tons of books about the aftermath of Macross was that there's not much to do for a PC during Macross. I mean, honestly, you can see that in the dearth of new products coming out, since HG got serious about "Canon" because HG's canon is a tremendously barren field.

Now Macross from Japan? that's a different matter of course. They've had love stories (with killer AI), renegade criminals, wandering fleets of zentradi, conspiracies within and without migration fleets--you can do just about anything you want in Macross, because unlike Robotech, there are lots of people, lots of places at (more or less) peace, and an immense amount of uncharted territory to explore without having to worry about breaking canon.

Which, since this is an HG board, proves that what HG must do is try to negotiate the rights to Macross and say farewell to Robotech.
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Re: The EBSIS

Unread post by Jefffar »

Uhm, this isn't an HG board...


But yes, the idea that everyone on earth is gone is something that doesnt even survive the visuals in the Macross portion. Thanks for the reminder of that.

The dialog about the number of survivors in Robotech just doesn't seem to match the visuals of multiple communities of humans spread across multiple continents that we see in the latter two chapers in the series.

This is fortunate for the RPG-verse because it gives a far greater ammount of things to play with than what adherants to the Macross level erradication of the human race beleive is there.

High Tech Bandits, Malcontents, The York Barony, EBSIS, etc ... These is a rich environment to play in for those who don't want to be handcuffed by trying to recreate the series.

Of course, a clever and resourceful GM can make the players a part of the events of the series in such a way that the players can feel like they are making a meanginful contribution to those events without undermining the fundamental story that is Robotech. I'm an observer in such a campaign right now, with each sesion matched up to a particular episode of the show. I wish I had the time to play in it because it's really quite incredible.
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Re: The EBSIS

Unread post by Seto Kaiba »

mech798 wrote:The problem is that within the anime itself, there are tremendously contractidoroy bits of evidence for the zentraadi bombardment.

Eh... yes and no. Those problems are exclusively consequences of the rushed and rather sloppy Robotech adaptation and various attempts by licensed materials to make the setting far bigger than it actually was.



mech798 wrote:On the one hand, we have Rick being amazed at flowers growing outside a reclamation zone.

On the other hand, we have Khyron's ship in a jungle.

The first problem is that jungles are not durable environmental structures--to the contrary, they're immensely delicate. The only way an Amazon Jungle survives two years after the bombardment is with a robust ecological backing. Which somehow indicates the Zentraedi managed to miss a part of the world that today, even ignoring major population sites such as cities, has a population in the millions. And again, if the bombardment was as bad as it was portrayed in teh movie--there wouldn't be any jungle, at all, because jungles are less durable than the kind of grasslands you find in the North American zones.

So that's evidence the first for a bombardment not being nearly as devastating as claimed. (Not to mention that Khyron was hiding in it. If there was only a little bit of the Amazon left, well, it would have been examined, especially if Rick is freaking out over some flowers). Doylist answer: The Japanese animators wanted a jungle and a story about giant warriors who freak out over J-pop is probably not going to tip the Hard Science scale very hard.

Well, you're not wrong about how fragile jungles are... but you'd be wrong to assume that a robust ecological backing is the ONLY way one would exist.

One aspect of the original story that was almost completely lost in the Robotech adaptation is that there was a massive government effort underway after the war to deal with the consequences of the orbital bombardment, keep Earth habitable, and the long-term recovery of the planet's ecosystem through the gratuitous abuse of cloning and genetic engineering technology. Earth's surface was a near-total loss with only a few tiny pockets of its original ecology surviving. The New UN Government installed a 500km-diameter solar shade in orbit to mitigate the effects of global warming, seeded a vast area of the ocean with genetically-engineered designer phytoplankton to scrub contaminants from the seawater and manage atmospheric composition, deployed similar designer bacteria to restore Earth's soil and clean up areas of radioactive contamination, used various means to deal with the atmospheric particulate levels, and used DNA from seed and gene banks to begin reconstructing native ecosystems through cloning and genetic modification.

Hikaru being shocked to find flowers growing wild outside of a Nature Regeneration Project work zone and Quamzin's ship being partially buried in a forest aren't contradictions... they're a connection. The wreck Quamzin salvaged was one that crashed in an area that was later targeted by the Nature Regeneration Project.

One thing to avoid when pondering topics like this is the assumption that the Japanese creators didn't think things through. Unlike Robotech's creators, they went into their work with a substantial amount of time and forethought instead of making it up as they went.



mech798 wrote:The second problem (we'll ignore the doylist bit of them being two different shows after Robotech) comes from both SC and New Generation, or their proliferation of cities. In Southern Cross, we know of New Macross and at least two other settlements described as cities. Even if they're small cities, say 20K, that's still over half the survivors, and 20 odd years isn't enough for new reproduction to replace everyone lost, even if some draconian "every woman is always pregnant" policy is followed, which wasn't a problem for Macross because they used cloning, but cloning is never even referenced in Robotechk, outside of the Zentraedi. (that's especially problematic when we see the scenes of people evacuating in various episodes--clearly thousands of civilians, many of them clearly older than the date of the Zentraedi attack).

The definition of terms like "city", "town", or "village" isn't applied consistently even today... so I don't think this is really an issue. Every culture or government sets their own standard, and even then that's not always followed.

This would have been less of a problem if Robotech's rewriters had more closely followed the original material, but it is what it is.



mech798 wrote:The problem gets worse in Next Generation, because we find yet another city--Detroit, and yet this is defined as a full scale urban city, complete with skyscrapers, that was evacuated during the second conflict, and either was built (implying a much larger population base) or survived the bombardment (implying a far less intensive bombardment than we got in macross).

Alternatively, you could argue the city did not suffer a direct hit and its population was wiped out anyway by starvation, a lack of access to clean water, atmospheric pollution, etc. and the people we're shown inhabited the city after the fact.



mech798 wrote:then there are the trees, most of them obviously old growth trees, which indicates anywhere from twenty to fifty year age, and again, a forest is very hard to build "from scratch" because it's such an integrated ecosystem. (We should note that the various scenes of earth we get in Macross properties don't have much in teh way of forests, they have cities and wastelands, which indicates that in Macross, even though it has a far higher degree of sophistication than Robotech, reforesting earth either proved impossible, or impractical).

Mind you, this is a problem between the Masters Saga and New Generation. "Earth" is shown to be largely desolate in the Masters Saga with very little vegetation of any type to be seen except around SX Point 83 where the remains of the protoculture matrix reside. There's a loss of containment there at the end of the Masters invasion and the next time we see Earth it's got an awful lot of forests to hide in. One could surmise that these two situations are connected, and that that flower of life somehow accelerated the recovery of the natural ecosystem.

(The desolation of "Earth" in the Masters Saga is a product of Southern Cross not being set on Earth at all. Earth in that setting c.2120 had been rendered incapable of supporting life in a nuclear holocaust and Glorie, the planet the series takes place on, recently emerged from an ice age with the assistance of human terraforming efforts. Its low levels of large surface vegetation are an effect of the planet's still-frankly-awful surface conditions.)

For Macross, well, terraforming a planet-sized parking lot is time consuming even when you have advanced alien genetic engineering and cloning technology to help. In that setting, the recovery of Earth's ecosystem is expected to take thousands of years despite the most advanced technology in the modern galaxy.



mech798 wrote:And then of course there is New York , which is either a stunning example of bad marksmanship by the Zentreadi--or there were enough people giving on earth, to force them to rebuild a city--and more importantly, forced them to rebuild a city that is largely useful due to it's position on the coast--which indicates other cities that need seaborne trade, a point somewhat reinforced by the existence of patrol boats in New Generation, which would be more or less useless against an alien attack, but would be quite useful to police local shipping.

Same as the above for Detroit, really... it doesn't have to be a rebuilt city. It can be explained as a re-occupied city that lost its population without being simply wiped off the map.



mech798 wrote:But in Robotech, the later shows especially indicate that this could not have been the case--there are just too many settlements, too many examples of well-established flora and fauna, and too many people running around who are old enough to be part of the surviving generation, and yet are not part of the military, to the point where we have news media, news conferences, and a fairly big government, instead of the kind of small government you'd naturally get for a few hundred thousand people, most of whom are military.

So... apart from the topics I've already covered above, the Robotech official setting's position on some of these topics offers explanations as well.

For instance, the government isn't "fairly big"... it's "mostly fake". Per HG's position on it, the government is essentially purely for show and doesn't actually govern anything. The military holds all of the actual power on Earth and the UEG is basically its Public Relations division. The existence of news media is covered right in the Macross Saga so it doesn't really need to be discussed in depth.



mech798 wrote:(You know, thinking of that, is there any kind of timeline on when Macross earth did get a civilian government? Gloval was running things for a fair long time, but at some point they did go civilian).

Officially? Earth established the New Unification Government in April 2010, about two months after the war ended. Prior to the atmospheric decontamination process reaching safe particulate levels the de facto capital was established inside the Macross and later moved out into Macross City once that was established around the ship.

Per Macross Outside Story: the Lost Two Years, which discusses the events of the timeskip between episodes 27 and 28, Brigadier General Bruno J. Global was its founding chief executive due to his status as essentially the only person in a position to coordinate relief efforts. (This is presumably why the New UN Forces later named an aircraft carrier after him - the Uraga-class CV-339 Bruno J. Global - in addition to the mass production Macross-class ship SDFN-04 General Bruno J. Global that was named in his honor for his military service. The UN Forces previously named two other aircraft carriers after other Unification Government chief executives: ARMD/SCV-01 Harlan J. Niven and ARMD/SCV-14 Robert A. Rhysling.)



mech798 wrote:But this doesn't make the EBSIS make any more sense, because it's a bad mishmash of 1980s evil Russians, and people who seem to be attacking for no other reason than to attack.

Well, there are signs that it's coming back into vogue... but it was pretty cliched even back then.



mech798 wrote:But this ultimately is all tangential to the real problem. Palladium came up with the EBSIS because without them... there's not much to do. Robotech is a tremendously barren gaming environment. The big issues are all handled by the main characters (who are not you) and the events are tightly written, not leaving much room for people to do anything other than play the other guys--like Rick Hunter and Scott Bernard only not as cool.

Precisely right.



mech798 wrote:That's why if you look at it, Robotech, from Marcross to Shadow Chronicles, pretty much as the same plot. Aliens show up, Aliens look for some MacGuffin, humans fight the aliens, and either squeak out a victory that only prepares them for the next battle or manage a ruinous draw. Rinse and repeat only with fewer humans at every point.

To be fair, that's a problem that Robotech mostly inherited from the source material.

Macross was an unexpected runaway hit, and the other two shows used in Robotech were shows that jumped on its particular bandwagon. MOSPEADA was a series by Macross's original sponsor that got hijacked by its toy partners being green-eyed jealous of Macross's toy licensing, and Southern Cross was Tatsunoko's attempt to make the Macross lightning strike twice but in a way they could claim the lion's share of the profits from. Stringing Macross and two Macross copycats together sounds smart on paper but it's less so in reality when you're trying to make three stories about humanity's first apocalyptic alien war join up in the middle.



mech798 wrote:It's... well it's not very good as a cartoon, but it's absolutely devastating for an RPG. The reason Palladium had tons of books about the aftermath of Macross was that there's not much to do for a PC during Macross. I mean, honestly, you can see that in the dearth of new products coming out, since HG got serious about "Canon" because HG's canon is a tremendously barren field.

Yeah... admittedly even in official original Macross side stories, it's mostly just faffing about in the proximity of the stuff the main characters are doing.

HG getting serious about canon was in expectation that RTSC would take off and they'd have to be taken seriously as a proper bloody mecha anime franchise. They did not expect the OVA to tank at all, never mind tank so hard that it got panned by the Robotech fanbase itself and cancelled with prejudice by HG's own management. "With the best of intentions, and the worst of luck". I honestly feel bad for the HG staff. They were genuinely trying, but they just did not have the resources to succeed. That has to be pretty hard to take.



mech798 wrote:Now Macross from Japan? that's a different matter of course. They've had love stories (with killer AI), renegade criminals, wandering fleets of zentradi, conspiracies within and without migration fleets--you can do just about anything you want in Macross, because unlike Robotech, there are lots of people, lots of places at (more or less) peace, and an immense amount of uncharted territory to explore without having to worry about breaking canon.

Really, it's the emigrant fleets that are what really opened that setting up. The main characters from the original obligingly sail off into the metaphorical sunset to never be seen again and the setting then has literally hundreds of what one contributor here once called "vagabond space cities" - he meant it derisively but it's just so apt - wandering the galaxy looking for a new home. So that's narrative license to do basically anything. It's a great big narrative blank slate that's allowed Kawamori and co. to tell stories about rock bands fighting space vampires, conservationists fighting illegal whaling, a rogue AI trying to kill the man it loves, Ghost in the Shell-tier intrigues and navel-gazing about the nature of humanity and consciousness, and even political dramas about the "Reality Ensues" consequences of total pacifism and the volatility of any passionate social movement.

Unfortunately, Robotech just kind of arbitrarily threw colony ships into its setting purely as a justification for the Ark Angel taking on the same role occupied by the SDF-1 in their plans for the "Shadow Saga", so the setting wouldn't have gotten the same degree of freedom even if they'd finished the OVA.



mech798 wrote:Which, since this is an HG board, proves that what HG must do is try to negotiate the rights to Macross and say farewell to Robotech.

Well, that's pretty much sorted... HG has bent the knee after getting a spider's worth of black eyes in court and agreed to facilitate Macross releases worldwide instead of opposing them, so we'll likely see Robotech become an artifact title like Star Blazers is on new Yamato releases.
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Re: The EBSIS

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Jefffar wrote:This is fortunate for the RPG-verse because it gives a far greater ammount of things to play with than what adherants to the Macross level erradication of the human race beleive is there.

High Tech Bandits, Malcontents, The York Barony, EBSIS, etc ... These is a rich environment to play in for those who don't want to be handcuffed by trying to recreate the series.

Mind you, the whole point that started this particular discussion was that that "rich environment" fits into the Robotech setting as smoothly, naturally, and painlessly as a cactus suppository.

They're not cogent or sensible additions to the Robotech setting. They're page count padding that that doesn't make a lick of sense even in context, and feels more like someone threw in something from a completely different series and expected nobody to notice. :wink:
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Re: The EBSIS

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mech798 wrote:because we find yet another city--Detroit,

I think you mean Denver not Detroit. New Detroit appears in The Macross Saga in one episode, Denver is mentioned in The Masters Saga and visited by the NG group, interestingly enough there is a domed city we can see in TRM saga (IIRC it's also connected with Denver). IIRC Detroit appears in the 1E RPG supplement Lancer's Rockers though.

Seto wrote:Alternatively, you could argue the city did not suffer a direct hit and its population was wiped out anyway by starvation, a lack of access to clean water, atmospheric pollution, etc. and the people we're shown inhabited the city after the fact.

I agree the best argument is that the City did not suffer a hit and its population was not wiped out by the strike directly. However, if the population did survive and could make contact with the SDF-1, that single instance could go a long way in explain the population disconnect in the canon-verse.

Seto wrote:Mind you, this is a problem between the Masters Saga and New Generation. "Earth" is shown to be largely desolate in the Masters Saga with very little vegetation of any type to be seen except around SX Point 83 where the remains of the protoculture matrix reside.

I would not read to much into that though:
-1. The ASC had 2x bases in SA IIRC that are identified by the NG group (though the ASC has been in SA since late TMS per dialogue)
-2. The Island Resort that introduced Corg/Sera is implied to have been a paradise BEFORE the Invid, and was a tourist spot
-3. The Masters Saga itself is geographically isolated to the SX-PT83 region, so we really do not see much of the surface (and from space it always seems to be heavily cloudy) and if we use it only it could be like only using the Giza Plateau to evaluate the status of the entire planet in terms of ecology

Seto wrote:Unfortunately, Robotech just kind of arbitrarily threw colony ships into its setting purely as a justification for the Ark Angel taking on the same role occupied by the SDF-1 in their plans for the "Shadow Saga", so the setting wouldn't have gotten the same degree of freedom even if they'd finished the OVA.

While "Colonies" is not a term I think is used in the 85ep series at all, dialogue in Ep61/NG#1 by one of the Horizon-T crew* could support a something like Macross Emigrant Fleets existing in the 85Ep Robotech. Though it could be as simple as SSL (or specifically the captured RFS) as it could meet the parameters laid out by the quote, though a mission specific type of ship would work as well.

*"We were all born out in deep space aboard a robotech ship"-or something close to this, I don't have the exact quote handy.
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Re: The EBSIS

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ShadowLogan wrote:IIRC Detroit appears in the 1E RPG supplement Lancer's Rockers though.

There is no such supplement. :wink: Surely you must surely be confused. Lancer's Rockers is a mass hallucination. Swamp gas. Something of that nature.


ShadowLogan wrote:I agree the best argument is that the City did not suffer a hit and its population was not wiped out by the strike directly. However, if the population did survive and could make contact with the SDF-1, that single instance could go a long way in explain the population disconnect in the canon-verse.

But the series remains adamant that the only survivors were the ones from the SDF-1.


ShadowLogan wrote:-1. The ASC had 2x bases in SA IIRC that are identified by the NG group (though the ASC has been in SA since late TMS per dialogue)

Which kind of invalidates it as a counterargument...


ShadowLogan wrote:-2. The Island Resort that introduced Corg/Sera is implied to have been a paradise BEFORE the Invid, and was a tourist spot

Which could easily be explained as a Nature Regeneration Project work zone - or as RT has it, a "reclamation zone" - specifically intended for recreation.

Admittedly, most anywhere would be a "paradise" next to the barren rock that made up most of the planet.


ShadowLogan wrote:-3. The Masters Saga itself is geographically isolated to the SX-PT83 region, so we really do not see much of the surface (and from space it always seems to be heavily cloudy) and if we use it only it could be like only using the Giza Plateau to evaluate the status of the entire planet in terms of ecology

Yeah... but that's about the ideal place for an ecological recovery effort, surrounded by the largest bodies of fresh water on the planet. If that area is barren, the rest of planet is not likely to be faring much better.


ShadowLogan wrote:While "Colonies" is not a term I think is used in the 85ep series at all, dialogue in Ep61/NG#1 by one of the Horizon-T crew* could support a something like Macross Emigrant Fleets existing in the 85Ep Robotech. Though it could be as simple as SSL (or specifically the captured RFS) as it could meet the parameters laid out by the quote, though a mission specific type of ship would work as well.

Pretty sure what they're getting at there is that they were born on a warship.
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Re: The EBSIS

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Seto wrote:There is no such supplement. :wink: Surely you must surely be confused. Lancer's Rockers is a mass hallucination. Swamp gas. Something of that nature.

No, I've got a (digital) copy of it from Palladium's website in the 90s (at the time I did not save the pics, had to make it fit on a 3.5" floppy). It's that bad RT Clone (1989 release) of a Macross 7 (1994 release) product.

Seto wrote:But the series remains adamant that the only survivors were the ones from the SDF-1.

And the math doesn't work as previously pointed out that needs explanation in canon, but is never addressed directly. The series itself offers possibility that some survivors are not being counted if we want to get overly technical (the Zentreadi contribution for example, or Edwards and Hayes).

Seto wrote:Yeah... but that's about the ideal place for an ecological recovery effort, surrounded by the largest bodies of fresh water on the planet. If that area is barren, the rest of planet is not likely to be faring much better.

Except that has the notion that the recovery rate will be uniform for the entire planet, and that most likely is not going to be the actual case. Weather patterns will influence this as I don't think there is any indication of serious/major weather control. Potential Conflict in a given zone is going to have an impact (Zentreadi Rebellion for one, possibly "Space Pirates", etc), and I can't think that the FTS-comic approach to burring the SDF-1 did the recovery effort in that area any favors either. Internal organization Politics is going to be another one (in terms of allocation of resources).

Seto wrote:Pretty sure what they're getting at there is that they were born on a warship.

I agree that is most likely, but most of the UEEF ships shown really do not seem setup to have room to efficiently raise large numbers of children, which could mean a "City-Class" vessel like the Ark Angel/SDF-1 would be needed (though the RFS/SSL could also fill this role easily) to centralize things.
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Re: The EBSIS

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ShadowLogan wrote:No, I've got a (digital) copy of it from Palladium's website in the 90s (at the time I did not save the pics, had to make it fit on a 3.5" floppy). It's that bad RT Clone (1989 release) of a Macross 7 (1994 release) product.

Nope. Definitely a mass hallucination. Swamp gas, leaking from a weather balloon, refracting off of light from the planet Venus... something like that.



ShadowLogan wrote:And the math doesn't work as previously pointed out that needs explanation in canon, but is never addressed directly. The series itself offers possibility that some survivors are not being counted if we want to get overly technical (the Zentreadi contribution for example, or Edwards and Hayes).

It's worth remembering that the main reason the math "doesn't work" is because of unofficial, fanmade material that was fraudulently presented to Harmony Gold as OSM by unscrupulous fan "experts".

If you remove those gross exaggerations, outright lies, and other critical failures of research from the equation then the math suddenly works quite a bit better.

Past that point, the only real issue that one berk who asserts Earth is populated by "millions of people". He can be dismissed fairly easily, because we know he's never actually been to Earth before and like the rest of the UEEF in space has no idea what the actual state of the planet is.



ShadowLogan wrote:Except that has the notion that the recovery rate will be uniform for the entire planet, and that most likely is not going to be the actual case. Weather patterns will influence this as I don't think there is any indication of serious/major weather control. Potential Conflict in a given zone is going to have an impact (Zentreadi Rebellion for one, possibly "Space Pirates", etc), and I can't think that the FTS-comic approach to burring the SDF-1 did the recovery effort in that area any favors either. Internal organization Politics is going to be another one (in terms of allocation of resources).

Unless the recovery was unnatural... which, from the OSM and implication in the New Generation, it was.

We went from a desolate planet that was barely clinging to life of any kind in the 2010s and 2020s to a verdant world in the 2040s. There is no way that happened naturally.



ShadowLogan wrote:
Seto wrote:Pretty sure what they're getting at there is that they were born on a warship.

I agree that is most likely, but most of the UEEF ships shown really do not seem setup to have room to efficiently raise large numbers of children, which could mean a "City-Class" vessel like the Ark Angel/SDF-1 would be needed (though the RFS/SSL could also fill this role easily) to centralize things.

To a certain extent, that can also be accounted for by the excision of the fraudulent material from their stats. Those ships are nowhere near as big, as heavily populated, or as laden with war materiel as "expert" fans have led others to believe. :roll:
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Re: The EBSIS

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The factory sat, if we go by Macross scales, could comfortably fit every building ever built on erth into it's version of a closet. (There's a reason why Macross is more or less post-scaricity, given how many they have). The only shock is the idea that Scott never experienced weather, because you could easily put in habitats that could have their own weather.

the problem is, well, to put it a bit crassly, You have two choices to get the number of young people we see.

Either one, Macross style cloning, or...

The surviving women are basically pregnant, all the time.

Unfortunately, the excreable Shadow Chronicles nuked option three: Lots of zentraedi immigration and assimilatoin by having it be made plain that Dana and her sister was a special case--and one not overly liked. (have I mentioned how terrible Shadow Chronicles was?)

Okay, let me repharse, that's not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is you then need people to raise those kids, and just look to Romania's experience for what you get when that doesn't work (humanity tends to do very poorly with forced population expansion schemes).

I mean, the smartest decision is just to assume that nobody talked about it, but there was cloaning going on, with some kind of rejiggered learning program. It'd explain the numbers, and would also explain why Scott, despite being an officer, often seemed to naive about how things worked, even compared to people like Annie.

But, it's likely this is just going to remain a academic question. I don't think we're going to see any future robotech products, or if we do, they'll be retreads of earlier material.
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Re: The EBSIS

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mech798 wrote:The factory sat, if we go by Macross scales, could comfortably fit every building ever built on erth into it's version of a closet. (There's a reason why Macross is more or less post-scaricity, given how many they have). The only shock is the idea that Scott never experienced weather, because you could easily put in habitats that could have their own weather.

With one or two extremely specific exceptions, the tech level in Robotech is much lower than that of the Macross OSM. The Zentradi had no real need or desire for creature comforts like fake weather in either setting, and in Robotech humanity's few interstellar spacecraft were fairly basic space warships with little in the way of creature comforts. That said, you'd expect Scott to have at least some experience with weather if he was at any point involved in the UEEF's campaign in the Sentinels worlds or trained at the base on Tirol.

His lack of experience with weather was more explicable in the original MOSPEADA, in which he was born and raised in a massive space colony orbiting Mars and had never set foot on a planet with actual weather before.



mech798 wrote:the problem is, well, to put it a bit crassly, You have two choices to get the number of young people we see.

We don't actually see THAT many young people... you could easily argue that the population is very low and we're seeing a significant cross-section of it.
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Re: The EBSIS

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Seto wrote:Nope. Definitely a mass hallucination. Swamp gas, leaking from a weather balloon, refracting off of light from the planet Venus... something like that.

Nope, looking at Robotech Multi-verse P-1987 branch/loop, you must be looking at HG-2001 or the P-2008 branch. (Titan Comics and their failed story line do establish a multi-verse do they not)

Seto wrote:It's worth remembering that the main reason the math "doesn't work" is because of unofficial, fanmade material that was fraudulently presented to Harmony Gold as OSM by unscrupulous fan "experts".

I'm not sure the math works even if one goes back to the OSM-esque levels for TRM and NG. For one we have that whole canon "broad strokes" Sentinels that is not being factored in (you know the War vs Invid Regent*). Even if we drop Sentinels, you still have potential conflicts with the known "Space Pirates" and "Micronized Zentreadi" mentioned in TRM (while conflicts are not established, contact is implied and given human xenophobia conflicts seem likely). Hypothetical disasters (pandemics, weather, earthquakes, "lost ships/fleets", etc). The UEDF:ASC and UEEF strategy and tactics do not seem geared toward reducing losses (or maximizing their chance of success).

And if you go back to OSM sizes, I think that would make the case even more for "City" Ships as it would allow efficient child management in terms of personnel allocated for long term use. It should be noted that we never have any type of acknowledgement or display of "children" on any known UEEF combat vessel in 2029-44 period at all, which I think would suggest they are not present on the known ship types (Tok, Garfish, Ikazuchi, Horizon, etc) which means a new ship type (Angel/Ark-A-type) is used or their surface-bases/space-stations are used for that role.

There is just no margin built-in using this approach, especially if HG ever does "fill-the-gaps" like they've basically done with every produced story short of TSC OVA in terms of period setting (RT3K might be an exception, but lets restrict this to produced and released products only). I also think it is far easier to explain away the 70k statement as a POV thing than to stick to it dogmatically as that seems to be HG/licensees approach for decades now. Given the state of the franchise I do not expect any canon solutions anytime soon.

Seto wrote:We went from a desolate planet that was barely clinging to life of any kind in the 2010s and 2020s to a verdant world in the 2040s. There is no way that happened naturally.

Except that we do not really get anything like a grand tour of the Earth in 2029-30, all the locales are geographically close together (everything was w/n "short" driving distance for VHTs). Both North and South America are very geographically diverse, pre-FoA wastelands existed and might not be targeted for recovery. Given that NYC evaded destruction in 2011 in the RoD, it is entirely possible that other regions of the planet could exist that also evaded destruction (and nature could potentially manage the fallout) from direct strikes. We also know that Earth's ecosystem was recovering in 2013 on its own, in addition to human guided efforts. I would say that human management would have ended in the 2029-31 period, the Invid don't claim credit for Earth's recovery (the Regis seems to put that down to allowing nature to run its course not some active Invid effort). All of which could contribute to the verdant world seen in 2040s (even technically in 2038 with 10th MD comic series), I'd even argue we see a decent recovery in 2029 for that region given all the forests shown around SXPT83.


*This is probably deserving its own topic, but: What if the UEEF drew the wrong experiences from fighting the Invid Regent, which is why the UEEF had such disastrous results with the Invid Regis?
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Re: The EBSIS

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The EBSIS is around so everyone can carry on with the Cold-War.
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Re: The EBSIS

Unread post by Seto Kaiba »

Peacebringer wrote:The EBSIS is around so everyone can carry on with the Cold-War.

Yup... that's why it was such an awful choice. "Evil Russians" was already a largely played-out trope by the time the RPG went to print, having been almost literally beaten to death the previous year by Rocky IV and losing a lot of its sting thanks to the dramatic reduction in Cold War tensions due to Soviet leader Gorbachev's liberalizing reforms of his government.

It didn't help that it also didn't make any sense in context, since Robotech prominently featured a rather unambiguously heroic Russian man in the role of the SDF-1's captain and even in the OSM the Russians were a founding member of the Unification Government.



ShadowLogan wrote:Nope, looking at Robotech Multi-verse P-1987 branch/loop, you must be looking at HG-2001 or the P-2008 branch. (Titan Comics and their failed story line do establish a multi-verse do they not)

Isn't that the timeline where Earth was overrun and conquered by a race of circus clowns composed entirely of sentient mildew? Surely no "good" timeline results in a sin like Lancer's Rockers.

(Though you have to admire the lengths Titan's staff went to to take the **** out of Robotech while working on a licensed comic for it. They created a Robotech multiverse specifically to flex on every previous failed Robotech project by labeling them all as dead-end Bad Future timelines where the human race is embroiled eternally in meaningless space war. Then they twisted the knife by establishing an exclusively Macross-centric Good Ending timeline with an even sunnier conclusion than most Macross stories that completely averts the Two Years After arc, Masters Saga, and New Gen Saga in favor of a wholly Macross-based future. Peak irony was finally achieved when the comic itself was cancelled, almost certainly as a result the UKIPO ruling against Harmony Gold regarding the ownership of the Macross trademarks in the UK where the publisher is based.)



ShadowLogan wrote:I'm not sure the math works even if one goes back to the OSM-esque levels for TRM and NG. For one we have that whole canon "broad strokes" Sentinels that is not being factored in (you know the War vs Invid Regent*). Even if we drop Sentinels, you still have potential conflicts with the known "Space Pirates" and "Micronized Zentreadi" mentioned in TRM (while conflicts are not established, contact is implied and given human xenophobia conflicts seem likely). Hypothetical disasters (pandemics, weather, earthquakes, "lost ships/fleets", etc). The UEDF:ASC and UEEF strategy and tactics do not seem geared toward reducing losses (or maximizing their chance of success).

Even if it doesn't completely close the gap, it narrows it considerably.

Instead of having to concoct wild theories as to how Earth's surviving population pulled an army of hundreds of thousands out of thin air, you can fall back on an answer that's 100% consistent with the animation and say that these armed forces only number a few thousand fighting men and women even thirty years later.

You also don't have to account for the presence of non-canon side antagonists like EBSIS, whose existence never made sense in a world where the UEG is not only the only show in town, but the sole source of most life-sustaining resources.



ShadowLogan wrote:It should be noted that we never have any type of acknowledgement or display of "children" on any known UEEF combat vessel in 2029-44 period at all, which I think would suggest they are not present on the known ship types (Tok, Garfish, Ikazuchi, Horizon, etc) which means a new ship type (Angel/Ark-A-type) is used or their surface-bases/space-stations are used for that role.

Combat vessels are all the UEEF had, and we have an explicit statement from the 2nd ERF crew that they grew up out in deep space on a ship... therefore...



ShadowLogan wrote:There is just no margin built-in using this approach, especially if HG ever does "fill-the-gaps" [...]

Eh... given that Harmony Gold has, for all practical intents and purposes, not only thrown in the towel but effectively retired I'd have to say that's not exactly a realistic concern anymore.



ShadowLogan wrote:Except that we do not really get anything like a grand tour of the Earth in 2029-30, all the locales are geographically close together (everything was w/n "short" driving distance for VHTs).

From orbit, the planet's pretty darn desolate...
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Re: The EBSIS

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Seto wrote:Isn't that the timeline where Earth was overrun and conquered by a race of circus clowns composed entirely of sentient mildew? Surely no "good" timeline results in a sin like Lancer's Rockers.

No that's an isolated unconnected branch/loop that shares the name Robotech that HG bought out for the name (eventually) after teaming up with the creators (though I'm not sure if one branch/loop or several). I don't know about "good" as that's a POV thing, but LR was certainly more tame in its use of musical weapons than say Macross 7 (as I understand summaries of it). And its not like LR originated the idea either of sonic/musical weapons.

Seto wrote:You also don't have to account for the presence of non-canon side antagonists like EBSIS, whose existence never made sense in a world where the UEG is not only the only show in town, but the sole source of most life-sustaining resources.

As the 1E RPG has its own unique defined timeline, and a timeline that has a lot more survivors on Earth than the show establishes, this means that in a discussion set w/n the 1E RPG branch/loop universe we have to look at from that perspective of what that source says (its canon) and not canon "Prime". We know fractionalization occurred in RT (Monument City was granted autonomy, and the Feudalistic Society could also indicate this), even with the UEG being the provider in town in the Prime, factor in more survivors like in the 1E branch/loop...

Seto wrote:Instead of having to concoct wild theories as to how Earth's surviving population pulled an army of hundreds of thousands out of thin air, you can fall back on an answer that's 100% consistent with the animation and say that these armed forces only number a few thousand fighting men and women even thirty years later.

The thing is that doesn't work, Point-K was supposed to have 6000 soldiers alone (which qualifies as more than a few thousand) and that was one UEEF Base we have even this level of detailed numbers on. There are a variety of factors and details to consider, so much so that 70k figure just breaks IMHO under the strain even with OSM ship crew sizes.

Seto wrote:Combat vessels are all the UEEF had, and we have an explicit statement from the 2nd ERF crew that they grew up out in deep space on a ship... therefore...

We also know they operated space stations (MARS-III, SSL, and captured Factory/Repair Satellites) in known animation, and at least some of them are known to be mobile allowing for them to be considered ships. I mean when you get down to it the ISS (and most to date manned space stations) are really ships as (generally) they do have the ability to alter their orbit (they need periodic boots to raise their altitude). The crew members comment does not automatically make them grow up on those ships either, just that they where born there (nothing about being raised).

Fun Fact the 1st Manned Space Station (Soviet/Russian Salyut 1) had a Delta-V capacity of 320m/s, which is not to dissimilar to the US Gemini Capsule (which most people would consider a ship). The only space station that might not be able to alter its orbit under its own power would be the US Skylab (it relied on reaction wheels for attitude control, and visiting craft to boot its orbit), though it is also standard procedure for stations to use a visiting vehicle to conserve their fuel (or because the visiting craft was blocking the thrusters).

Seto wrote:From orbit, the planet's pretty darn desolate...

From orbit the planet is shown to be heavily cloudy. Which is unusual, but that doesn't mean the view from orbit was desolate (you might be thinking of the lunar shots, those can at times look like the planet). Then again its probably also worth remembering that was is technically shown is not Earth, so this is one of those rare instances where I'd even argue the animation should be ignored since it was originally drawn to not represent Earth but the alien world Glorie.
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Re: The EBSIS

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ShadowLogan wrote:As the 1E RPG has its own unique defined timeline, [...]

Not intentionally.

That's a product of two things... the lack of a clearly-defined official setting at the time, and the publisher throwing in material that flew in the face of the actual story in order to pad the game.


ShadowLogan wrote:[...] this means that in a discussion set w/n the 1E RPG branch/loop universe we have to look at from that perspective of what that source says (its canon) and not canon "Prime".

This presupposes that the 1E RPG is a recognized AU. Harmony Gold explicitly refuted that position, and the official stance on the 1E RPG's content is that it is simply incorrect.


ShadowLogan wrote:The thing is that doesn't work, Point-K was supposed to have 6000 soldiers alone (which qualifies as more than a few thousand) and that was one UEEF Base we have even this level of detailed numbers on. There are a variety of factors and details to consider, so much so that 70k figure just breaks IMHO under the strain even with OSM ship crew sizes.

Remember, Scott had little idea how badly the UEEF had been mauled by the Invid when he got to Point K. Point K itself is clearly nowhere near large enough to contain 6,000 troops. That figure must be an unduly optimistic one from some briefing that assumed much lower levels of attrition among the 1st and 2nd ERF than actually occurred, since 6,000 was approximately the entire population that made up the 2nd ERF.


ShadowLogan wrote:We also know they operated space stations (MARS-III, SSL, and captured Factory/Repair Satellites) in known animation, and at least some of them are known to be mobile allowing for them to be considered ships. I mean when you get down to it the ISS (and most to date manned space stations) are really ships as (generally) they do have the ability to alter their orbit (they need periodic boots to raise their altitude). The crew members comment does not automatically make them grow up on those ships either, just that they where born there (nothing about being raised).

... we've never had anyone in-series refer to a space station as a ship.


ShadowLogan wrote:From orbit the planet is shown to be heavily cloudy. Which is unusual, but that doesn't mean the view from orbit was desolate (you might be thinking of the lunar shots, those can at times look like the planet). Then again its probably also worth remembering that was is technically shown is not Earth, so this is one of those rare instances where I'd even argue the animation should be ignored since it was originally drawn to not represent Earth but the alien world Glorie.

We've also got the official line art, which shows a very desolate planet all-around.
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Re: The EBSIS

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Seto Kaiba wrote:
mech798 wrote:the problem is, well, to put it a bit crassly, You have two choices to get the number of young people we see.

We don't actually see THAT many young people... you could easily argue that the population is very low and we're seeing a significant cross-section of it.


Which is actually really depressing since it means that humanity is more or less spending it's seed corn on battle after battle for a world that they wouldn't even be able to really occupy with so few left. Robotech humanity is likely teetering veryh close to the edge of non-viability, and certainly is destroying much of humanities "culture" ironically getting closer and closer to the zentraedi.

Seriously the smartest thing would have been to just accept the loss of earth, find some world that is out of the way, and accept the use of less advanced power technology. The Regess certainly seemed to have no interest in conquest for conquests sake, so she likely would have just stayed on earth.
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Re: The EBSIS

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Seto Kaiba wrote:Yup... that's why it was such an awful choice. "Evil Russians" was already a largely played-out trope by the time the RPG went to print, having been almost literally beaten to death the previous year by Rocky IV and losing a lot of its sting thanks to the dramatic reduction in Cold War tensions due to Soviet leader Gorbachev's liberalizing reforms of his government.

It didn't help that it also didn't make any sense in context, since Robotech prominently featured a rather unambiguously heroic Russian man in the role of the SDF-1's captain and even in the OSM the Russians were a founding member of the Unification Government.



Palladium games is not the only one. Maximum Mike's R. Talsorian had reemerged Russians in Hardwire for their Cyberpunk game; really, it's Cyberpunk; and FASA's Battletech had a lot of Soviet-interaction in the early histories.
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Re: The EBSIS

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Seto Kaiba wrote:
Peacebringer wrote:The EBSIS is around so everyone can carry on with the Cold-War.

Yup... that's why it was such an awful choice. "Evil Russians" was already a largely played-out trope by the time the RPG went to print, having been almost literally beaten to death the previous year by Rocky IV and losing a lot of its sting thanks to the dramatic reduction in Cold War tensions due to Soviet leader Gorbachev's liberalizing reforms of his government.


"Today , Germany , Poland and Russia comprise the United Eastern Bloc Soviet Independent State. The largest and most stable of the independent nations . They have refused all invitations to join the unification movement and have been actively soliciting against the recreation of the one world government."

To be fair though, they hardly are "evil Russians" at all. Soviet they may be in name, but it is doubtful what of the ideology could have retainned the form it had before the influence of Gorbachev. Most PNJs proposed by the supplements were German or Poles in origin. Even the single Russian one lived elsewhere. For one, the historical COMECON contained much more than Russia itself, and would probably reorganize very differently once freed from the double-vote of their overlord. Plus, we don't really know what had happened to the Gorbachev august coup in Robotech. Hints tells us that it didn't go the way we had it IRL, with high probabilities of this bringing about the Neo-Tsarist revolution, in the late 90s. Furthermore, the old comics seems to treat the COMECON and soviet bloc nations as a now separate entity from "the Russians".

We do not know if this is because the neo-tsarists won (though they were close to it at some point of Return to Macross), or if it was because the Gorbachev faction eventually rejoined the internationalists. We do know, however, that Russia did indeed rejoin the UEG. And according to the E.B.S.I.S. biographies, not everyone was happy with this, and some did flee toward COMECON territories into the other soviet bloc countries. So, even if the Russian quadrant was supportive of the UEG, a great part of eastern Europe might have been like the Ontario and Québec quadrant; silently objecting and probably harbouring some anti-UN ragtag terrorists.
People that might refuse to submit under "a returning ship of dead people" used in propaganda to demonize their ideals, even more considering that the UEG is the governing body that lead to the Zentraedi Rain of Death in the first place, by "keeping most of the world in the dark". (People had two years to try and escape the earth, in whatever ships they imagine they could have built... More, if all budgetary concerns had not been kept for Macross Island and the grand cannons fiasco.) I would hardly call a grieving continent, aching for the return of normal days, "evil".

Furthermore, the 1st edition tells us that northern Europe and Ireland did escape in parts the Zentraedi RoD. With some people fleeing what would become the E.B.S.I.S. toward these, and then others getting toward the E.B.S.I.S.; to flee their own now overcrowded territories. And this, is what brings the E.B.S.I.S. into being. Not "Evil Russians", but survivors of nations, of which some did historically remained communists states after the fall of the Russian politburo. People that were mostly abandoned to the malcontents attacks coming from the east of the continent, and even taking troodi defectors on their side, offering them protection from the rampaging racism in the ASC's territory.

Really, trying to fit this into a cold war narrative is just ignoring the context of the specific universe RT is. You could count the E.B.S.I.S. as "bad malcontent era stretching" (other would call it retcon meant to smooth the transition from one show to the next), but that already would be more on point than saying the books did anything to describe the soviets, at large, as badies. Not much more than the RDF or ASC at least. If anything, their style of government is described as being better to orient newly migrated Zentraedis. Which make the E.B.S.I.S., technically, a more peaceful and less fascist state than the Neo-Feudalist Southern Cross.

Now If a gamemaster WANTS to use them as evil Russians, in order to save himself the research... Yeah, I guess one could dumb it down. But that is not necessarily what the manuals were alluding to at the time, I think. Painting them as "evil russians" would have required much less effort from their part. I rather see their way of writting the E.B.S.I.S. as a form of reconciliation for the SSRs that meant their socialism well, and not necessarily in a cold war "splitting the world" mentality.
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Re: The EBSIS

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mech798 wrote:Which is actually really depressing since it means that humanity is more or less spending it's seed corn on battle after battle for a world that they wouldn't even be able to really occupy with so few left. Robotech humanity is likely teetering veryh close to the edge of non-viability, and certainly is destroying much of humanities "culture" ironically getting closer and closer to the zentraedi.

Oh, absolutely... and, to its credit, Robotech actually leaned into that exact point at the end of the New Generation and again in Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles. The Regess's criticisms of humanity as "tainted by the shadow of the Robotech Masters" in the series could be taken as exactly that: that humanity had become a warlike species that sought only conquest. The official setting of Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles straight-up formalized the fact by indicating on no uncertain terms that every human living in space is either a soldier or a child on course to become a soldier.

It even made it into the RT2E core book, which asserts that military service and combat is virtually all the space-dwelling human population knows.

Plans for the unproduced second, third, and fourth/final episodes of the Shadow Saga OVA suggest that there was supposed to be an effort to correct that, with humanity and its new allies now living in peace together after the defeat of the Haydonites in a heavily DYRL?-inspired story.

(Yes, RTSC really was just an overlong, overwrought Robotech version of the two minutes or so of original animation from the old PS1 DYRL? game showing how the Macross ended up out in deep space.)



mech798 wrote:Seriously the smartest thing would have been to just accept the loss of earth, find some world that is out of the way, and accept the use of less advanced power technology. The Regess certainly seemed to have no interest in conquest for conquests sake, so she likely would have just stayed on earth.

It would've been, yeah... but you have to remember that the United Earth Forces are shockingly open about their xenophobia. Even the theoretically heroic members of the UEEF brass openly express xenophobic views in the Prelude comic, including a belief that the Invid Regess will use Earth as a jumping off point for her own campaign of interstellar conquest. All that seems to separate the UEEF protagonists like General Reinhardt and Captain Grant from the renegade antagonists like General Edwards in Prelude is a matter of the severity of their xenophobia.



Peacebringer wrote:Palladium games is not the only one. Maximum Mike's R. Talsorian had reemerged Russians in Hardwire for their Cyberpunk game; really, it's Cyberpunk; and FASA's Battletech had a lot of Soviet-interaction in the early histories.

Yeah, the cyberpunk genre really found its feet in the early-to-mid 1980's when Cold War tensions had yet to begin their decline. That genre had heavy Japanese influences, and you see the Cold War hostilities reflected even in titles like Ghost in the Shell.

FASA's BattleTech was, of course, as creatively bankrupt and shamelessly derivative as they could get away up to and including actual overt copyright infringement so it's not surprising that they also went for a low-hanging fruit like "Evil Russians".



xunk16 wrote:"Today , Germany , Poland and Russia comprise the United Eastern Bloc Soviet Independent State. The largest and most stable of the independent nations . They have refused all invitations to join the unification movement and have been actively soliciting against the recreation of the one world government."

To be fair though, they hardly are "evil Russians" at all.

It's literally Russia and two countries that were occupied by Russia during the Cold War... well, one-and-a-half countries, since West Germany was occupied by the Allied Powers instead. It's the three countries that were literally the most prominent in western cold war hysteria: Eastern Germany, Poland, and Russia itself.

It's the Evil Russians trope played absolutely laser straight. The minimalist set dressing is just excuses for what is presented in the most direct form imaginable as just "The Soviet Union, again". That faction is presented as having little else to do besides engage in acts of unprovoked aggression against rest of the world in the manner western media presented Soviet imperialism.
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Re: The EBSIS

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Seto wrote:Not intentionally.

That's a product of two things... the lack of a clearly-defined official setting at the time, and the publisher throwing in material that flew in the face of the actual story in order to pad the game.

That lack of a clearly-defined setting as you put it though IMHO is why stuff from that period should be treated as self contained alternate universes, even if HG doesn't want to deal with it in this format having fans do so can certainly simplify a lot of discussions that would be much clearer using other properties that have official AUs (and as you said Titan Comics last story arc essentially established a Multi-Verse of a sort).

What is also interesting to note about this period is that even lacking a "clearly-defined official setting at the time", both PB and Mckinney based media agreed on two major aspects: that more people survived the RoD and the timeline's general dating for NG events if not the specifics. IIRC McKinney mentions they had a somewhat symbiotic relationship with the Comics at one time (I can't say, I've never been a big comic book reader), which could push for another media block (though AFAIK the comics are supposed to be a fragmented mess) agreeing with them.

Seto wrote:Remember, Scott had little idea how badly the UEEF had been mauled by the Invid when he got to Point K. Point K itself is clearly nowhere near large enough to contain 6,000 troops. That figure must be an unduly optimistic one from some briefing that assumed much lower levels of attrition among the 1st and 2nd ERF than actually occurred, since 6,000 was approximately the entire population that made up the 2nd ERF.

While Scott might be expecting 6000 troops to be there, that means if those are all UEEF troops from earlier operations then those 6000 people existed at one point, weather they made it to Point-K or not is irrelevant, it shows the UEEF (assuming they are all UEEF) had at least 6000 troops they attempted to base there. There are also potential implications from Point-K that if extrapolated from can poke a very big hole in this Sole 70k figure, but I think we should move this aspect to the population thread for continued discussion (viewtopic.php?f=9&t=174817).

Seto wrote:... we've never had anyone in-series refer to a space station as a ship.

Granted, but given they play loose with terminology and such it is an avenue worth considering from a technical standpoint if not usage one.

mech798 wrote:Which is actually really depressing since it means that humanity is more or less spending it's seed corn on battle after battle for a world that they wouldn't even be able to really occupy with so few left. Robotech humanity is likely teetering veryh close to the edge of non-viability, and certainly is destroying much of humanities "culture" ironically getting closer and closer to the zentraedi.

Seriously the smartest thing would have been to just accept the loss of earth, find some world that is out of the way, and accept the use of less advanced power technology. The Regess certainly seemed to have no interest in conquest for conquests sake, so she likely would have just stayed on earth.

It is also depressing that humanity learned nothing either in that the higher ups are unwilling to even attempt to talk to the enemy (not that the other side is innocent in this regard either), even as a stalling tactic. We saw it time and again: the UEDC refused to consider it until after the got a chance to use their BFG, the UEG/ASC didn't attempt communication, and all three alien factions could have tried diplomacy first (The Haydonites/Sentinels seem to be the exception, but we do not really know how the alliance was formed between the UEEF and these races).
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Re: The EBSIS

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ShadowLogan wrote:That lack of a clearly-defined setting as you put it though IMHO is why stuff from that period should be treated as self contained alternate universes, [...]

All in all, just because a licensed product doesn't conform to the official setting isn't anywhere near enough to justify making it an alternate universe.

For most franchises, including this one, that's just "non-canon". Doubly so when the reason the work doesn't conform to the setting is because it's a poor quality product in the eyes of the IP owner and its audience. (That's the very reason cited by Harmony Gold for having included the old RPG in the licensee-created materials it disowned during the franchise's reboot.)

It's not an alternate universe, it's just wrong.



ShadowLogan wrote:[...] (and as you said Titan Comics last story arc essentially established a Multi-Verse of a sort).

They did... but only for Robotech's animated features plus their comic, and that comic itself is likely to be considered non-canon because it was poorly received (read: "widely mocked"), that the artists used materials Harmony Gold no longer has a license to (e.g. Megazone 23), the fanart the comic's artists plagiarized, and the external legal situation.



ShadowLogan wrote:While Scott might be expecting 6000 troops to be there, that means if those are all UEEF troops from earlier operations then those 6000 people existed at one point, [...]

Not just that... the more important aspect of that dialog is that Scott is presenting a muster with an estimated strength of 6,000 as a major strategic force in-theater.

Enough so that he thinks that the loss of such a force essentially means the war is over, and sinks into depression. That lends support to the OSM numbers argument, where 6,000 really would've been a substantial force almost the size of the entire 2nd ERF. He was probably hoping most of the 2nd ERF would be there, instead of dead.
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Re: The EBSIS

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Seto wrote:It's not an alternate universe, it's just wrong.

In the context of the way HG has packaged it sure, but creating organized divisions w/n that non-canon mess in a relatable way is needed. Though treating the non-canon mess as a bunch of AUs doesn't really change the fact that they are non-canon toward the main universe.

Seto wrote:Not just that... the more important aspect of that dialog is that Scott is presenting a muster with an estimated strength of 6,000 as a major strategic force in-theater.

Enough so that he thinks that the loss of such a force essentially means the war is over, and sinks into depression. That lends support to the OSM numbers argument, where 6,000 really would've been a substantial force almost the size of the entire 2nd ERF. He was probably hoping most of the 2nd ERF would be there, instead of dead.

I agree Scott presents it as some unbeatable force and loses it for a bit at the reality. The question I have is why he would think that size force would be unbeatable (Scott does say "We can't lose", but Rand shakes his head to that notion). 21st MD was smashed, and on screen they can be shown to reasonably have 2/3 of that capacity using RT/HG-sourcing (then there is the 10MD which would based on RT/HG sourcing and Invasion comic page spread).
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Seto Kaiba
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Re: The EBSIS

Unread post by Seto Kaiba »

ShadowLogan wrote:In the context of the way HG has packaged it sure, but creating organized divisions w/n that non-canon mess in a relatable way is needed.

Not really, no. Amid non-canon material, that the material is non-canon is the only essential organizational division. Irrelevant or incorrect material doesn't require any categorization beyond the fact that it is irrelevant or incorrect.

The only other useful or relevant organizational divisions of non-canon material are by series or by their origin (author/publisher).

Trying to assign non-canon materials to unofficial "universes" is an arbitrary and capricious exercise at best, since the material is so internally contradictory and even theoretically self-contained "takes" are frequently at odds with themselves never mind each other. It's also irrelevant, when the only universe they belong to officially is "None".



ShadowLogan wrote:Though treating the non-canon mess as a bunch of AUs doesn't really change the fact that they are non-canon toward the main universe.

It's highly problematic, because it lends them an entirely false air of legitimacy that may cause material that is unofficial and incorrect to be mistaken for valid.

It's essentially in "Alternative Facts" territory. They're not valid alternatives, they're just completely and unambiguously incorrect.



ShadowLogan wrote:I agree Scott presents it as some unbeatable force and loses it for a bit at the reality. The question I have is why he would think that size force would be unbeatable (Scott does say "We can't lose", but Rand shakes his head to that notion). 21st MD was smashed, and on screen they can be shown to reasonably have 2/3 of that capacity using RT/HG-sourcing (then there is the 10MD which would based on RT/HG sourcing and Invasion comic page spread).

As noted previously, this is very easily explained if you use the animation-correct stats instead of the fallacious fanmade ones.

By Scott's standards, a force of six thousand soldiers is a massive amount of manpower. He's expecting to link up with a force on the ground that is nearly the size of the entire Earth Reclamation Force he arrived with some weeks earlier. Remember, the 2nd ERF was a force meant to retake the planet by destroying the Invid headquarters at Reflex Point. He's stoked because that force of six thousand that sounds so paltry to us is, by the standards of his time, a substantial force judged large enough to liberate an occupied planet.

It doesn't make any sense to assert that there are millions of humans around after the First Robotech War if, thirty years later, an armed force of just six thousand is considered an overwhelming show of military power capable of planetary conquest. FFS, Djibouti has a population of not quite a million people and its armed forces number almost three times that not counting reserves, and more than five times that size counting them. The idea that there are enough survivors to have rival nations to the established One World Government able to be self-sufficient in a world where that government was the sole source of life-sustaining supplies is just... silly and unbelievable, even by the already slightly strained standards of giant robot anime. That that already-unbelievable rival power bloc is a pack of Evil Russians operating on levels of ham straight out of Rocky and Bullwinkle takes it past silly to just plain STUPID.
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