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Post by MacrossMike on Apr 9, 2014 23:46:53 GMT
Copy and paste my previous responses from the other site, I guess... lol.
Basically, in the Macross universe(s), no schmuck hacker is going to have access to any kind of computer capable of actually hacking into those OTM supercomputers without also having government/military backing. These systems are extraordinarily secure, being that they're based upon/built around hardware and software created by the galaxy's most advanced species and perfected over half a million years.
Cyber-warfare hasn't really been an issue in either Macross universe because the computers they use are heavily secured both in physical and digital terms, and often decentralized to prevent one failure from bringing the entire system crashing down. Macross doesn't follow in Star Trek's footsteps by having a single, centralized computer system which can fail and leave you screwed, or get broken into and leave someone else in charge of your ship. The systems can rely on human operators and AIs to monitor them, and since things like ships have enjoyed (variously) either extraordinarily secure communications or literally un-interceptable communications, there's little avenue for any kind of hacker attack.
It's not without reason that the ONLY times we ever see hackers make any headway in Macross is when they're genius-level tech-savant types with the best computing equipment defense industry money can buy, already have the kind of credentials that would afford them a good deal of access to the target system anyway.
Because these computers are 1. architecturally not based on human technology and 2. as a consequence not operating on human-made machine languages, it's unlikely a Digital Reaper would be able to even establish two-way communication with an OTM computer system, without years of study anyway...
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Post by MacrossMike on Apr 10, 2014 18:26:37 GMT
Interesting thoughts. My other thought was that due to the war with the Protodevlin, the Protoculture may have taken steps to prevent their own forces from turning on them, so they probably didn't give the Zents their "best/perfected" equipment. This would be rather at odds with the official information, which indicates that the Protoculture were equipping their forces with their very latest, bleeding-edge weaponry right up to the end of the war. The best-known example of this was the Quimeliquola Queadluun-Rau, an advancement that pushed the envelope so hard the Protoculture literally had to build a better pilot to make it workable. That's how they ended up assigned to the female divisions... those were new troops purpose-build to be superior pilots. On top of that, the automated factory satellites which were constructed to arm and provision the Zentradi Army were able to refine their products over time... so, in practice, what the UN Forces encountered in 2009 was the Zentradi Army using designs that were mostly the latest and greatest technology available during the dissolution conflict, refined by the factory satellites over half a million years. Most Zentran/Meltran gear seems rather brute force, perhaps that's why it lasts so long, and may also explain why the Zentrans training is so limited. [...] ... have you watched the show at any point? Zentradi technology is incredibly robust and easy to use, but it's also shown to be insanely precise, efficient, and effective. Britai's 67th Branch Fleet opened the first space war by folding into the moon's gravity shadow to make detecting their arrival more difficult, and followed that up by showing that his fleet could engage in bombardments so precise that he was able to flatten the city around the Macross without so much as scuffing the Macross's pain from a light-second away. I think your impressions here are colored more by Robotech's insulting flanderization of the Zentradi than Macross itself... in Macross, the Zentradi are NOT stupid and their training is actually quite good. As one would expect, if you're raised to do a particular job your ENTIRE life, you tend to be quite good at it. Their weapons are extremely powerful, but they're also extremely precise and extremely durable... I would remind you of Macross Frontier's pointing out that Zentradi technology is SO robust and SO reliable that even weaponry that Alto'd salvaged from a destroyed Zentradi battle suit that'd been floating in space for thousands of years was still completely operational. That fact wasn't lost on the UN Government either... that's why they started using Zentradi technology in their variable fighters, ships, and so on, and even went so far as to commission General Galaxy to restore the Quimeliquola Factory Satellite so they could produce a new and enhanced version of the Queadluun-Rau. The systems don't seem, to me, to be systems that were "perfected" just ones that were "good enough" for their soldiers and once humans got their hands on it they may have upgraded it and may have rewritten things to be more to their liking especially if there were any hidden codes left behind by the Protoculture. That's the difference between your opinion and the facts baldly stated in the official information for the last thirty-odd years. Both the individual series and the official information clearly, concisely, and repeatedly indicate that Zentradi (and Meltrandi) tech is much more advanced and reliable than what humanity can independently replicate. Their hardware might not be perfect, but the designs which were in service during the Stellar Republic's final days were designed by the Protoculture at the height of their civilization's prowess and in the intervening 500,000 years have been patiently refined by the factory satellites. There is a very good reason that the UN Spacy used Zentradi overtechnology in their variable fighters starting almost right away after the first space war ended, and why they continue in the use of Zentradi (and Meltrandi) overtechnology in so many other fields of endeavor from medicine to shipbuilding. In both series we see the Zents represented as nearly a slave caste of warriors who were built simply as throw away cannon fodder. Which goes to show that you weren't watching very carefully... the Zentradi were not "throw-away cannon fodder". They were an army made up of highly trained, well-equipped, and brutally effective designer soldiers. The original series shows us that their commanders are NOT blase about the lives of their troops... even though they do believe in acceptable losses, they aren't blase about the lives of troops. They think tactically, they act cautiously. They're career soldiers and they're VERY good at their jobs. Kamjin, in particular, shows he's NOT thinking of his troops as cannon fodder... he refers to them on familial terms, literally calling them the "Kamjin clan". Why go through the trouble of really training your troops if you can just clone new ones and give them a "memory dump" of select skills for their specific job. You wouldn't want to take the chance that they might turn on you and if their equipment really was "the best" and "perfected" then you'd have a much harder time controlling them or defeating them if they turn on you. Because the Protoculture wanted an extremely effective and disciplined fighting force that could contain conflicts before they became a threat to the Protoculture themselves. That came back to bite them in the arse during the schism war and the republic's dissolution, but those conflicts were also driving forces in ensuring that the Zentradi Army was equipped with the very best, most reliable equipment and weaponry possible. I also wonder if the UN Spacy's security was all that high if Jan Newman (from Macross Plus) could hack Sharon Apple's AI and Sharon could so easily break not just the Macross's security but the entire Terran defense system. Admittedly she IS an AI herself, but if the encryptions are as good as you figure neither of them should have been able to get in so easily. Perhaps you forgot this, but the Macross Plus OVA harps pretty hard on the fact that Jan Neumann is not just a mechanical genius, he's a hacker of considerable skill and no small renown. When Guld hacks into the low-security test ordinance loading system to sabotage Team Shinsei, Jan is the person he tries to (indirectly) pin the blame on for the YF-19 No.2 getting shot up, citing that Shinsei had a notoriously good hacker on their project team. On top of his skills as a hacker and engineer, Jan also happens to be defense contractor's top design engineer with the highest security clearance. You may have also forgotten that he didn't hack Sharon Apple's AI... he hacked into the Ghost X-9 prototype, which was operating in its remote guidance mode at the time. Lastly, you've also forgotten that Sharon Apple didn't have to hack anything... she was already behind the bulk of the security measures, thanks to her having been plugged into the Macross's computer network. The same network, mind you, that services the New UN Forces Command... the UN Government's equivalent of the Pentagon and NORAD, which is located aboard the Macross (and first appeared in the original Macross series). She just had to use her hypnotic abilities to disable the entire staff and then had a free run at Earth's defenses during the incident. (You may note that this is why the technology behind her AI was, and remained, illegal and had strict restrictions on its usage even by the military.) Sharon probably had an especially easy time taking over the Ghost, since it used the same bioprocessor that Sharon herself had recently been (illegally) upgraded with. (Mind you, there's also no evidence that she took over the ENTIRE Earth defense network... just the surface defenses in Macross City and the orbital satellites. The grid would probably have responded anyway, considering Isamu's unannounced and illicit attempt to penetrate the grid.) I t even seems that the gunship, aka ASS-1, had better tech than the Zents themselves as it, alone, was as powerful as any single Zent vessel and under the right conditions is capable of taking out multiple vessels. Er... you do realize that the Supervision Army (or Meltrandi) gun destroyer that became the Macross was no more advanced than literally any other Zentradi warship, right? The Zentradi have their own gun destroyer-class ship with much the same armament and an identical operational profile, a class of ship that's shown in the animation to be one of their more common medium-scale ships of the line. Likewise, the Meltrandi of the DYRLverse have not one but TWO classes of ship to fill that role... the medium-scale gun destroyer class upon which the Macross was built, and the slightly larger gunship that Milia and Chlore are both famous for commanding. The reason the Macross was as powerful as any single Zentradi ship is because it basically was the Supervision Army/Meltrandi medium scale ship of the line after human renovation. Both the Zentradi and Meltrandi gun destroyers boast the same big gun that the Macross does... and several Zentradi and Meltrandi ship classes boat even bigger and more powerful ones. |
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Post by MacrossMike on Apr 11, 2014 1:04:18 GMT
I hadn't forgotten those things, it was just that my recollection of it was a little different. Jan actually does try to hack Sharon's AI during the first concert on Eden but at that time she wasn't complete (still being "run" by Myung). Remember, the Sharon Apple system was a cutting edge - but civilian - virtuoid emotion simulator. It didn't have nearly the security that something the military would've been using, and at that point it wasn't even really a proper AI... her behavior program depended on inputs from brainwave sampling carried out on Myung. You'll also want to note that Jan did all that from a freaking wristwatch, though what he's done is caught right away by the Venus Sound Factory's engineers. Once he was back at New Edwards, he broke into the computers the Venus Sound Factory kept Sharon's program on and stole the whole thing without raising a single alarm. I agree that the military systems would be incredibly tough to try and hack into, but no system is completely hackproof. Oh, no system security is ever foolproof... that much is obvious even without having your MS in Computer Security and a Certified Ethical Hacker certification. However, the weakest link in any security system is usually the human operator rather than the system itself, which would be why Social Engineering attacks are far and away the most effective kind of attack (and why everyone from your phone company to your bank asks you all those security questions when you call 'em). Civilian systems can be broken into as easily as ever in Macross, but the military's tech is something else entirely... and unlike today, the military's systems are policed by human operators AND artificial intelligences. Don't forget the resources a Digital Reaper has at his/her disposal; three dedicated military grade AI's to assist in hacking and cyberwarfare as well as the psionics of Telemechanics (and potentially TM Operation and Machine Ghost as well) add in a high I.Q. score and they become very formidable even if the systems the are trying to acces might be alien in design. Again, the definition of "military grade AI" probably differs between the Macross universe, in which humanity's AI technology advanced by leaps and bounds thanks to an influx of alien technology, and the RIFTS setting where the tech is largely human-developed over less time. But the stickiest wicket would be establishing some kind of two-way communication with the wholly alien technologies that computers in Macross are built upon. We're talking machine languages and protocols which are not human in origin and, in the case of communication over wireless means, often the application of cross-dimensional communications. (Which are established to be largely hack-proof and, in most cases, jamming-proof.) The gunboat seemed a more powerful ship because it carried equivalent firepower to most Zentran/Meltran ships but was of smaller size (and thus potentially more manuverable). As every ship save, possibly, for the Oberth-class guided missile destroyers had the necessary technology to manipulate their inertia and mass in flight, it's unlikely that they would've been noticeably more agile than the rest of the ships. To get ahead in that category, what you need is massively overbuilt engines like those on the Battle-class super carriers and Macross Quarter-class assault carriers. The gun destroyers (<- correct term) had their chief advantage in that they traded their mecha carrying capacity for the extra firepower of those heavy converging beam cannons... effectively trading the preferred offensive strategy of "the death of a thousand cuts" for a rather less subtle "the death of a sledgehammer to the face". But hey, when you absolutely need that enemy planet glassed yesterday... as long as you have plenty of cover while you're charging that cannon up. (That's why reaction warheads are preferable... the really big ones take whole minutes to charge.) Admittedly I may be influenced by RT as far as the Zents are concerned (bad, RT, bad, bad, bad!) but by everything I saw in the series their tech, while more advanced than that of the humans, did not seem to be the "best" stuff and I saw/heard of no evidence of refinement by these factory ships. It's talked about at a fair length in the official materials, but the various shows do talk about the virtues of Zentradi technology (the most recent being Klan Klan's little talk about how reliable the stuff is in Macross Frontier). What really drives home that Zentradi tech really is all that and a bag of potato chips is the way post-war rogue Zentradi groups manage to develop their own hybrid variable fighters with an alarmingly tendency to match or even exceed the performance of the UN's technology. The first time it happened, as depicted in Macross M3, the rebel Zentradi managed to make off with a VF-4 and developed a new VF with that technology behind it. Not only did the resulting fighter match the performance of the UN Spacy's next-generation VF-11 and VF-14, the thing was so well regarded by the UN Forces that, when they broke up the rebel group that developed it, THEY ADOPTED THE ENEMY FIGHTER. That's how we got the VA-110 Variable Glaug, boys and girls. Similar stories are attached to the Feios Valkyrie (a synthesis of the VF-11's OTM and Q-Rau tech) and the Queadluun-Alma (a hybrid of the Feios and Q-Rhea). It should also stand as a testament to the high regard the UN Forces hold Zentradi overtechnology in that not only does virtually every Variable Fighter from the VF-5000 on incorporate Zentradi OT, the UN/New UN Forces continued to use Zentradi mecha for decades, so much so that they actually specifically set out to capture the Quimeliquola factory satellite to facilitate their continued use as well as a new Queadluun variant with a greater emphasis on operator safety... which is the standard for the NUNS Marines and SMS's platoons of Zentradi troops. Actually, come to think of it, the extensive use of Zentradi tech by the Macross-5 fleet, including its stealth-upgraded Nupetiet Vergnitzs-class battleships and a Zentradi-influenced Battle-class carrier is also a pretty great argument for it. I kinda question the level of the factory ships AIs as I don't have full info on them (outisde of RT) but they, too, seem kinda "basic" (you wouldn't want your enemies to get a hold of a truly powerful AI, now would you?). The only factory satellite you've seen is one that was established in-series to be in pretty rough shape... so your confusion is probably a little understandable. Considering both sides in the war already had 'em, worrying about them falling into enemy hands was a moot point. Remember, the two wars the Protoculture fought were both against their own people. They seem programmed to just repair and replace Zentran/Meltran equipment, not make upgrades/refinements (I agree that logically that's what they SHOULD be doing, but I never saw any evidence of it in the series). Again, because you've only seen one factory satellite that was in poor condition... due to repeated offensives by the Supervision Army. Never mind that that factory satellite principally produced the most cost-effective of all Zentradi mecha, the Regult, one of the oldest of the Zentradi Army's designs, but also one of the most proven. When I see the series I don't see humans incorporating Protoculture tech into their equipment, I see them coming up with entirely new ideas and uses and building their own equipment using that tech as the base. Not until Macross Plus do I see an attempt to integrate human and Protoculture tech (the YF-21 and the BDI system). Anyway thank you for your thoughts and information, it's given me a lot to think over and possibly add to any campaigns.  It's not overt because most of the technologies are incorporated "under the hood". That the UN Forces started adopting Zentradi OT in their equipment is explicitly mentioned many times in official publications. The first VF explicitly mentioned to have incorporated Zentradi technology was the VF-5000 Star Mirage (introduced in 2020), but it's been true for pretty much every VF since. In fact, usage of more than average amounts of Zentradi OT is one of the hallmarks of General Galaxy's entire product line. (Why? Because the design chief at General Galaxy IS a Zentradi... the first Zentradi mentioned to have gotten an advanced degree, Algus Selzaa.) Macross II is practically a love letter to the integration of human and Zentradi overtechnology. Literally every fighter seen in the OVA is, simply put, a quite literal hybrid of human Variable Fighter overtechnology and Zentradi battle suit overtechnology. The adoption of that Zentradi OT tripled generator outputs, reduced fuel consumption, reduced maintenance requirements, improved durability in combat, and introduced a quantum leap in actuator technology that made the fighters even faster and more responsive, while also cutting the time to transform by at least half. Then you've got stuff like what's in Variable Fighter Master File, which suggests the UN also adopted radar and radio improvements from Zentradi OT and started using them almost immediately after the war, along with enhancements in battery technology for various needs, and miniaturized energy weapons tech. |
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Post by MacrossMike on Apr 11, 2014 18:00:24 GMT
See that's where you beat me. I don't have access to many of those works, I have Macross II RPG and videos, Macross Plus (on DVD) and Macross Frontier (and of course Robotech), so I was not aware of alot of the background stuff. Now the info you've given me fills in ALOT of gaps, but I don't agree with some of the concepts the creators decided on as they just don't make sense to me. To be blunt, whether or not you agree with it is entirely immaterial. I'm just giving you the facts, and in this case these facts have been presented consistently throughout decades worth of material and have been major plot points in several Macross titles and featured very prominently in the in-universe technical continuity of BOTH Macross universes. I might argue the time difference between Rifts and Macross; it's 2098 when the apocalypse happens for Chaos Earth and by that time the human tech was pretty advanced. They already had nanotech, railguns, power armor and equivalent nuclear/ fusion power plants, possibly even better as they have longer operational life spans. The technology that dropped into humanity's lap in 1999 was produced by a civilization that had been an interstellar empire for a couple thousand years... a species that had mastered the intricacies of space and time, and manipulated the universe's fundamental forces for shits and giggles. We're talking an alien species so advanced that they crossed the line into "sufficiently advanced" and kept going. Most of what you've listed there isn't all that advanced either. We're not that far from sustainable nuclear fusion right now, railguns are dirt cheap and depressingly easy to make unless you're trying to fire rounds off at hypersonic speeds, and so on. Operational spans are meaningless because 1. Palladium mistakenly assumed that Macross mecha used nuclear FISSION power and 2. a longer operational time only means you're carrying more fuel. It doesn't translate to higher output. Just to give you some basis for comparison, in the Macross universe in the year 2012... - Railguns had already been a part of the UN Forces arsenal for several years on both mecha and starships.
- Nuclear power had been supplanted by the cleaner, safer, more efficient, and more powerful thermonuclear reaction overtechnology, which produces no harmful radiation and generates colossal amounts of energy using tiny amounts of fuel by exploiting the physics of super dimension space. Just one of the VF-1's engines produces more power than three Nimitz-class nuclear aircraft carriers (or 650 megawatts vs. about 208 megawatts). The thermonuclear reaction turbine engines used by VFs are so fuel efficient in atmosphere a VF can operate for days or even weeks without refueling and has an effectively unlimited sortie range.
- Power armor technology is pretty mundane, to the extent that many pilot suits incorporate a powered motion assist system for high g-force support. The technology is rarely used on the battlefield by humans because no powered suit could carry a weapon powerful enough to accomplish much against Zentradi mecha.
- Medicine had reached the point where it was entirely possible, even easy, to clone an individual right down to their memories, and to reconstruct extinct species from leftover genetic samples.
Now in Macross we're at what, 2060(?) by the time of Frontier and 2092 for Macross II, so the original period of time for the research and development is about the same for both settings, it's just that the inclusion of the Protoculture tech warps things. At present, 2060 is the farthest forward the main Macross timeline has gone... and 2092 is where Macross II's events ended. But humans from the Macross universe blow anything the RIFTS humans have into the weeds decades before that. While automated vending machines and trash recycling bots are seen in the Macross time line, those things could easily be replicated by the CS or any other tech power in Rifts. Well, yeah... because those are extremely low-end, consumer-grade examples of robotics. That's like saying we're on the same tech level as Star Trek because Star Trek has androids and we have a freaking Aibo. So despite the inclusion of the Protoculture tech I'm figuring a rough parity in some areas, like computer tech and weapons tech. ... and you would be MASSIVELY wrong to assume so. Though I would say that Rifts has higher miniturization levels (as evidenced by the body armor and hand held weapons tech in Rifts), as well as infantry energy weapons tech as opposed to Macross where everything is built for the Valkyries or other larger scale units and the main story line Valkyries STILL use solid shell ammunition (as opposed to Macross II where their Valkyries use railguns and have access to heavy duty particle beam tech and plasma tech). You would, of course, be misinformed on that front... because Macross is not a setting where the infantry really do anything. For any and all practical purposes in Macross, infantry means "battroids" 99% of the time. Macross does have infantry-scale energy weapons... it's just that they're not often used because bullets are cheaper and do the job just as well with less complexity. The energy weapons really shine when people want a non-lethal solution, beam stun weapons are seen as a particular favorite of certain planetary security agencies because they can stop a perpetrator without physically harming him/her. Lethal energy weapons have a lot of practical downsides compared to good old fashioned bullets. Mind you, you're also misled about the subject of mecha-based weaponry in Macross. Everything you've read in the Macross II RPG is, in practical terms, a lie. The only thing that book has in common with Macross II is the line art they traced. Let me set the record straight here for you: VFs in Macross use solid-ammo weapons with good reason. The defensive technologies in Macross include super-alloy armors and energy conversion armor, a technology that can use excess generator output to turn relatively thin plate metal into nigh-impenetrable armor. To reinforce that further, practically every mecha incorporates an ablative anti-beam coating into its paint, enhancing their resistance to the commonplace multi-megawatt beam weaponry in the setting. The rotary cannons and other heavy machine guns used by many VFs fire a special assortment of rounds designed specifically to counter energy conversion armor technology, giving them a better chance of causing damage than a brute-force attack with a high-output beam weapon or, often, micro-missiles. Virtually every Valkyrie in Macross also incorporates energy weaponry to complement its gun pod... high-output laser machine guns early on, followed by beam machine guns and scaled-down converging energy cannons. Railguns in Macross are less common because railguns have higher maintenance requirements than the more traditional rotary cannons, and are also more vulnerable to a variety of battlefield threats like electromagnetic pulses. Also, railguns aren't exempt from Newton's laws, so unless you're prepared to deal with even greater recoil forces than a regular cannon, you're not going to get performance that exceeds an ordinary cannon. Macross II's UN Spacy makes extensive use of railgun weapons, because theirs are like a hybrid of railgun and coilgun tech that minimizes recoil forces, and because they have SO MUCH excess generator output that they can easily afford to slap anti-ship railguns on their fighters. (The Valkyrie II's generator output is explicitly stated at 3,900MW... three times that of a VF-1, and roughly 18 times the output of a Nimitz-class supercarrier.) Their particle beam tech is no more "heavy duty" than anything in the man timeline, the only beam weaponry they carry is the beam machine guns in the "head". There are no plasma weapons present in Macross II's VFs, that was pure bullcrap by Palladium's writers. (The VF-XX's gunpod is, in fact, a laser machinegun.) I agree that as far as starship tech the Macross timeline is ahead, currently, but I view the gap as being much smaller. So that IF a Macross vessel ended up in CS/Triax hands it wouldn't take them as long to figure out the tech as it did for the humans in Macross. My reasoning behind this is because by the time of Macross Plus, M 7, Frontier and MII (yeah I know MII is technically not part of the main Macross story line) we're seeeing more of the human's concepts of that technology instead of outright Zentran influence. You would, of course, be demonstrably wrong to take that view... but you seem to be basing your decisions here principally upon "Unless the technology looks alien, it isn't alien". Human starship technology in Macross incorporates power plants that use the physics of 10+ dimensional sub-universes to generate vast amounts of energy from tiny amounts of fuel, they can teleport themselves across thousands of light years by bending the very fabric of space-time, they can communicate instantaneously across those distances using similar principles, their sensor systems have ranges that, for long-range systems, have to be measured in light-days, their energy weapons are not mundane lasers or particle beams, but rather a focused fusion explosion triggered by drawing exotic superdense matter through an artificial rift in space-time so hard it undergoes fusion and can shoot the Earth's surface from lunar orbit with pinpoint precision... I could go on. Most of that technology is human-made copies of Zentradi overtechnology, our outright Zentradi overtechnology. Now that also works the other way, with the exception of certain areas of Rifts tech that the Macross timeline has no experience with such as cybernetics and mutant animals (though the Protoculture were VERY far ahead in terms of genetics and cloning as evidenced by the Zentraedi). Eh? Where is THAT coming from? We see cyborgs among the Zentradi ALL THE FREAKING TIME. There have also been numerous cyborg characters in Macross. In fact, in the DYRLverse, the control interface for the Queadluun-Rau and Nousjadeul-Ger is partly cybernetic. Human cyborgs appear all the time. Manfred Brando in Macross VF-X2 was a cyborg. Virtually everyone on the Macross Galaxy fleet is a cyborg... Sheryl actually notes that she's one of the few people there who ISN'T, and that being "all natural" is part of her appeal there. Macross the Ride shows us many people from other colonies that are also cyborgs, like Nicolas Berthier, Oscar Brauhitsch, Maris Stella, Naresuan, and so on. Cybernetic technology in Macross is a pretty mixed bag though. Military grade stuff makes the Ghost in the Shell cybernetics look rather primitive, though consumer grade stuff isn't much better than GitS scale. |
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Post by MacrossMike on Apr 11, 2014 22:05:28 GMT
Perhaps I am wrong, but as I said you guys are working from the magazines, etc. which I've never had access to. Actually, a lot of the information I've been dispensing here is has been made available on various Macross fan sites... obviously including both the Macross Compendium and Macross Mecha Manual. It's not just magazines, mind. The sources I'm talking about include various Macross shows, canon video games, canon manga titles, the one canon light novel to date, the official Macross encyclopedia, the many Macross technical manuals (incl. the Variable Fighter Master File series), the animation production materials, official series art books, the creator interviews and promos in magazines, and so on. I always question some of their "tech" (like the so-called "energy conversion armor, lovely bit of handwavium that) but I understand that this is all the creators ways of explaining things that seem impossible in the anime or they're throwing in cool sounding terms just for effect. Eh... would it dig a massive hole in the artery of your attempt at an offhand dismissal if I pointed out that energy conversion armor may be a thing that we actually have in the very near future? There are similar technologies that exist RIGHT NOW. This isn't the creators blindly tossing handwavium at the wall to see what sticks... the creators are big military buffs and it shows in their work. The energy conversion armor thing has been a part of Macross for ages, and has been mentioned in-series, so it can't be dismissed. II'm working on the idea the the humans of Macross have back built the technology to the point where they can now produce it normally w/out trouble. Built BY humans FOR humans, using human understanding of an alien technology (of course humans ARE a colony of the Protoculture race so it's more like it their predecessors technology). As I've pointed out before, the actual standing of human technology is that human overtechnology is fundamentally derived from Zentradi overtechnology to begin with. They're either producing imitations of Zentradi systems or applying the basic technologies in new and very unorthodox ways to accomplish goals the original developers probably never intended. You're essentially saying that the Protoculture tech is so advanced that the CS would have trouble understanding/hacking it DESPITE the fact that it "only" took the humans in Macross 10 yrs to rebuild the ship and another 60 yrs to get a solid grasp of the technology and that the humans would NEVER bother to try and reproduce the systems themselves. They'd stay totally reliant on Zentran systems that use Zentran coding instead of, y'know, being humans and figuring out how to reproduce the same systems themselves. Yes, I am absolutely saying that the CS would have trouble understanding and/or hacking overtechnology systems precisely because the underlying technology is alien and operates differently from conventional human technology. We're talking technology that's easily a few thousand years ahead of the normal pace of human technical development. The other issue we keep coming back to is that knowing the principles behind a piece of technology's operation doesn't mean you can reproduce that technology perfectly. Humanity does know how the overtechnology systems they use work... but the stuff they build themselves is not, as bluntly stated in at least one Macross series, anything like as reliable or efficient as what the Zentradi have been using for half a million years. Even if CS humans encountered an intact OTM system, it would still take them a good while to figure out what made it tick... and it may prove impossible for them to replicate some of it, considering the exotic materials required. Also, as I've pointed out, even if humans are building their own computers based on Zentradi overtechnology, the language that matters there is the machine language... the processor logic that the computer actually uses. So long as their processors are still based on that overtechnology they've recovered, and they are, they're going to be operating on the same (or very similar) machine languages to what those original Zentradi systems used. You need to understand the difference between a low-level language and a high-level one. What your computer actually operates on is machine language, the lowest level. Everything above that is increasing layers of abstraction the programmers use to make creating applications easier. The high-level language is effectively meaningless in terms of what the machine's actually going to do... no matter what language you write your program in, once it's compiled it's going to be machine language. So, if it only took Macross Earth 70 yrs total to grasp this tech, then the CS , who are at base (ala Rifts RPG & Chaos Earth) 100 yrs ahead of where Earth was when the ASS-1 crashed and Triax who are years ahead of the CS at that same time, could not only understand the tech they could do it in LESS time and possibly gain greater benefits from it, too. That's faulty logic and you know it. The overtechnology in question is thousands of years ahead of what humanity has in either case, and your estimation of where CS is WRT modern humanity is way off the mark. They're at most 30 years ahead of us, and only in a couple of fields. (Some of the shit the defense industry builds would probably give you a kid-in-a-candy-store moment.) CS might make headway faster in some areas, but that's still YEARS to understand a system... assuming they can devote the resources of an entire PLANET to the recovery and study of that material. That's what it took to analyze the systems of the Macross and rebuild the ship. The research and development resources of a unified Earth. You provided me with examples of other cybernetics (outside of Macross Galaxy and the Zentran) that I was not aware of which corrects my intial impression of just how widespread cybernetics actually is. I'm baffled as to how you could miss it, honestly... Brera's "big reveal" is fairly early in Macross Frontier, and wiring and frigging swords are not normal parts of human anatomy to say the least. EDIT: Alto and Sheryl also have a conversation about how common cybernetic implants are in her home colony fleet in "Star Date" where she mentions that cybernetics are so common in Macross Galaxy that her being all-natural is part of her appeal there. Macross Galaxy's a colony fleet about the same size as Macross Frontier, so that's a LOT of cyborgs in a population of about 10 million humans. There's also the owner of SMS's parent company, who has visible implants, along with Major Ogotwhai, Captain Temjin, and Ogotwhai's adjutant in the New UN Spacy 33rd Marines. That's all JUST in Macross Frontier proper. We see cybernetically-augmented characters in other titles too, like Oscar Brauhitsch (arm), Nicolas Berthier (nervous system enhancements), and Maris Stella (full body) in Macross the Ride, as well as NUNS Colonel Ushio Todo and SMS's Aisha Blanchett in Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy, Quamzin Kravshera (RT: Khyron) in Macross 2036 and Macross: Eternal Love Song, Manfred Brando in Macross VF-X2, and so on. As a note, the reason given as to why cyborgs are only really high-visibility in later Macross titles is that cybernetics were available from early on after the first space war, but the UN Government actually banned the use of elective cybernetics on humans until 2048. Several colonies never did legalize, or only grudgingly legalized, cybernetics... and the New UN Government banned combat cyborgs (though that didn't stop Macross Galaxy from developing them anyway.) |
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Post by MacrossMike on Apr 12, 2014 0:07:37 GMT
My feeling is that there should be a qualifier of "for their setting" added. I feel that their defenses are not quite what I envision the CS having, but that's MY Opinion (which is like assholes, occasionally loud and smelly  ). I think the biggest sticking point would honestly be compatibility between CS technology and Macross's overtechnology. We're talking two radically different computer technologies here... from two completely different schools of thought. If you thought having zero compatibility between Windows PCs and Macs when 99% of them are the exact same technology, this would be WORSE. Hacking is a tricky business at the best of times, but you need two-way communication and you need to be able to interpret the communications which your target is using. Assuming that the CS hacker could access UN communications, it would still take a considerable span of time for him (or her) to unpick a completely new and never-before-seen set of communications protocols. (Being that this sort of thing is a subject I actually got master's degree in... I tend to approach the idea in practical terms.) I respect and LOVE all the background info, but the premise of humans using the Zentran language for their computers doesn't make sense. Actually, it makes perfect sense if you have the first clue how computer architectures actually work. Here, right now, on Earth, there's thousands of different sets of machine language encoding schemes. There are certain common conventions because the technology we use comes from a common origin, but when you get past binary (and there are MANY different ways to encode something in binary), the processers we develop usually have their own, individual assembly languages. For instance, an Intel processor and an AMD processor do not actually speak the same language at the assembly level. Ever major family of processors has had its own, architecture-specific new assembly language set, which is usually not intercompatible with other processor families. If humans have inherited, and continued to use overtechnology processor technology, the low-level languages the computers run on will ultimately be just minor variations on the same low-level language that Zentradi computers use because that's tied to the design of the actual processor hardware. Since humans and Zentran use the same numerical system (and according to DYRL humans are descendants of the Protoculture), just represented differently, there's no reason that once the humans understood whhich Zentran symbols stood for what, they then could reproduce the Zentran coding in Terrran coding for their own purposes. Again, that's a different problem entirely. You're thinking of the user interface design... what the user actually SEES. Changing THAT is almost painfully easy if you know what you're doing. That's not connected to the high-level programming language used to develop new software or edit old software, which is simply a high-level abstraction that must be converted into that hardware-specific low level code before it can actually be run. Compilers are software that converts the high-level languages into something the machine architecture is able to understand and operate upon. What you're talking about here is like changing the language in Windows. That's not coding. That's literally just changing labels. It has ZERO connection to the operation of a program. What the CS hacker is going to have to contend with if he intends to challenge an OTM computer system is the low-level machine language and the program logic encoded therein. If he's not able to interpret the logic that it runs on or the way the system actually stores data during operation, hacking it is IMPOSSIBLE... because actual hacking is not breaking down a door, it's tricking the system into doing something it's not supposed to do. You have to actually be able to communicate with it before you can trick it. If Jan Newman, a normal human genius w/ no psionics could hack Sharon Apple with wrist watch, then, again, I see no reason a CS trained Digital Reaper WITH psionics and THREE CS Military grade AI's to back him up could not hack a U.N. Spacy starships computers. Now I will say that due to the seperate cores he/she would have to actually phsyically access each core to do it, but it COULD be done. Jan Neumann had a number of advantages over your scenario... the first being that his computer and the target computer were both OTM systems, and thus compatible technology using some common protocols and system architectures. They speak the same language on the network layer. He was not attacking a high-security system like a UN Spacy military network... he was attacking a civilian computer, one which was not well-protected. It wasn't even a real AI at that point, just a complex simulation of human brain chemistry. It was no more protected than any modern civilian computer (which is to say, barely at all). The CS Digital Reaper is at a significant disadvantage because, even if he has PHYSICAL access to the system, his technology isn't using the same technology as the target system. It's from a completely different school of technological thought. The two systems would not communicate in the same way. They wouldn't share the same frequencies, the same network protocols, the same polling intervals, even their methods for storing data in memory are likely wildly different. Consider that, on a modern computer, if you take machine code from the memory of a system that stores using a LE configuration, putting those same values into a system whose memory use a BE orientation is going to yield nothing but gibberish... and the only thing that would change is the order in which the bytes of an individual value are put in. What I think is going to be the BIGGEST problem is that radically incompatible architectures involved. The Digital Reaper's AIs and other hardware are going to be derived from human von Neumann stored program computer architectures, while one of the more curious bits of information about computing technology in Macross is the statement that it is NOT based on the von Neumann stored program computer principles we take for granted. (In fact, the OTM computer system that governs the VF-1's avionics has, as the first two letters of its acronym, Anti-Neumann.) Ultimately, the Digital Reaper will likely be looking at a completely alien architecture fundamentally incompatible with own technology. Honestly, the Digital Reaper's biggest hurdle is going to be the lack of compatibility with the wholly alien computer architectures that are the standard in Macross for everything from laptop computers and cell phones right on up to starships. That, more than anything, would keep him out of the system. |
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Post by MacrossMike on Apr 12, 2014 0:21:39 GMT
I agree that the physical systems the U.N. Forces use are based off of Zentran/Protoculture tech, but I honestly feel that the U.N. commanders would have tasked someone to break down the Zentran computer codes and render them into Terran equivalents. Once that was done the rest just follows. Your argument here, as I illustrated in my last post, is based on a complete misunderstanding of how a computer even works. The language that MATTERS here is the processor's assembly language... the code expression of the logic that's literally physically built into the processor itself. They wouldn't need to BREAK the codes and rewrite applications... just gain enough of an understanding of the machine language to develop their own compiler to convert human high-level programming languages into that alien machine code. Even if they're building their own new processors around that alien technology, the resulting low-level languages are going to be derivative of the alien tech's low-level language. The reason Macross Earthhad to devote the resources of the ENTIRE planet was because of the difference in tech, plus if the rest of the world was NOT involved the shit really would have hit the fan. This would not be any different on Rifts Earth... because overtechnology computer systems use a fundamentally different operating logic from what our computers use. ASS-1 crashed in 1999 and was not relaunched until 2009, so I'm looking at the progression of tech in Chaos Earth as progressing nearly 100yrs more down that line (1999 -2098) thenwe add in the near 300 yrs of the "Dark Ages" and the CS has been a power for about the last 80 yrs with Triax stuill running. Doesn't matter... overtechnology is a radical departure from even the most basic conventions that have underpinned our own technology. If the CS is using systems developed from what we have today, it will not help them in any significant way with overtechnology. I laugh at the energy conversion armor because I've heard of it and been flatly told it's a joke by people in the know. Sure you have... which is why the army wants to put a simple version of that technology into its next generation of tanks. They want to use electric reactive armor, which uses high-voltage current generated by the turbine and run through the armor material to essentially vaporize projectiles which strike the outer armor and penetrate... which completes a circuit and causes the resulting arc flash to burn the projectile to vapor in a millisecond. Electromagnetically-reactive ceramics are further off... but still a work in progress. I also look at the series itself and can see what I couldn't back in my younger days (I was blinded by the science fiction and the awesome story) namely the deep cultural aspects of the writers and the influence that has had on their perception of how the series has gone. This is hard to swallow because, as we've illustrated before, you've missed baldly-stated facts directly from the show itself like the very common nature of cybernetics. If, indeed, the Macross project was funded by the groups you've mentioned previously then I have to look at it from the logical standpoint of what those nations would do and the idea of still using Zentran machine language when the possibility exists that there may be hidden code tells me that they would do just as I said, order their computer techs to decipher the Zentran machine language and reproduce it using human machine language. That's hard to take seriously... because you've demonstrated repeatedly you don't have the first idea how a computer actually WORKS, so every "conclusion" you've come to is fundamentally misinformed. Your whole argument here makes no sense, because it has no connection to how computers actually function. |
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Post by MacrossMike on Apr 12, 2014 0:50:00 GMT
Let me briefly explain how a computer actually works and the different layers of abstraction in code.
At the very lowest level is MACHINE CODE. On a human computer, this is numerical instructions presented in binary that represent various physical logic processes designed into the circuitry of the processor. This is what the computer actually uses to run, and the instructions in the machine code are hardware dependent, meaning that, because they're 1:1 directions to enable or disable physical logic on the actual chip, the instruction set is unique to that particular hardware design or family of designs. Intel and AMD processors, for instance, don't use the same machine code language, and their languages are incompatible with each other.
Above that is Assembly Language, a symbolic abstraction that presents those binary instructions as a set of symbols (basically just code words) that are easier for a human being to interpret and manipulate. The symbols in an assembly language usually correspond on a 1 to 1 basis with the machine code instructions physically built into the chip. The abstraction is simply there to make it easier for a human to try manipulating those commands directly to do something useful. This means that, like machine code, assembly language is tied to the actual physical hardware design.
Collectively, Machine Code and Assembly Language are called Low-Level Languages. This means there is little or no abstraction from the physical processes of the hardware.
Above those are the High-Level Languages, which are NOT tied to the specific architecture of the system. This is the many programming languages you've probably heard of, like C++, or Java, or Python, or Basic... which remove the need to deal with commanding the hardware directly to do arithmetic to make the computer do a task, and instead allow the programmer to develop software of greater complexity with less effort by allowing the user to manipulate a higher level of logic including variables, arrays, objects, classes, subroutines, and functions. This code is converted into something the computer can actually use when it's compiled or interpreted. Compilers convert the code into machine code that the hardware can understand and use. Interpreters are a special type of compiler that does the conversion into machine code on the fly. Java is an example of an interpreted language. Because they are not tied to the hardware logic, a high-level language is portable, meaning it can be used on many different platforms.
To frame this explanation in a context you can use for this discussion... the researchers at OTEC and the various other defense contractors and technology firms involved in analyzing and rebuilding the Macross would not need to "break" the alien ship's machine code and create an all new one. As they were imitating the processor technology they recovered from it to build their own overtechnology computer systems, all that was necessary was to understand the logic built into the hardware and develop a compiler that could convert a human high-level programming language into the machine code language of the alien processor technology.
If you're developing a new low-level language, you're not using the existing processor technology... because that language is built into the processor's physical design. A new low-level language literally means an entirely new processor.
Humanity didn't need to invent their own new programming languages to work with overtechnology computers. If they're building all their computers using the same principles and technologies (even if they're not copying the technology whole hog), they're still using the logic, and thus the low-level language, built into that hardware. All they need to do is create a compiler that speaks that low-level language. They can develop their own software for that alien hardware until they're blue in the face, but at the end of the day the compiled code isn't a human-developed programming language... it's the alien one from the overtechnology systems they reverse-engineered.
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Post by MacrossMike on Apr 12, 2014 14:34:42 GMT
The basic fact is until you or some one else produces "accurate" fan conversions we're pretty much stuck making guesses and using either the Palladium rules or our own, both of which may fall short of reality. Eh... no. The real problem is much more basic than that. We can make approximate comparisons of capability based on what the official sources for Macross say and what's described in the RIFTS books. A direct comparison is not going to happen with Palladium's rules, as a direct result of Palladium's rules not being well-suited to capturing the sheer scale of technology in Macross. Technologically, the ruleset has been stuck in 1980s American SF... and ignores a whole bunch of realistic points that anime in generally usually takes as read. Take, for instance, Palladium's perplexing belief that AIs only fall into two basic types... sentient and non, and that a non-sentient AI will ALWAYS be inferior to a sentient one. Any first-year computer science student could tell you why that's a load of BS. Likewise, they've got this inexplicable hardon for lasers and railguns... lasers being, in practical terms, far and away the weakest form of energy weapon in reality and in most SF settings (excluding something like sonic weaponry) and the fact that the average railgun is no better than modern conventional equivalents, and making one superior also means greater recoil forces for the user to cope with. The very idea of MD as a sharp delineation is wrong as well. There's a lot that would prevent an "accurate" fan conversion of Macross mecha... which is why the majority of fans who make their own Macross stats throw a bunch of Palladium's rules out the window either because they're stupid or don't fit. So all this talk of how powerful the Overtech is, is largely irrelevant until it's represented by numbers which everyone can see and relate to. A bigger problem is going to be that Palladium's numbers for almost everything are utterly arbitrary. To them, there is little difference in damage potential between a round from a 70kJ railgun and a round from an 800kJ rotary cannon. A sane man, or anyone who passed at least the second grade, should notice right away that one SHOULD do a little more than 11 times the damage of the other. You can get nice, firm numbers from Macross on many subjects... particularly those related to engine thrust, generator output, warhead yields, and energy weapon power levels, but you can't get that information from Palladium. Mega-damage weapons are supposed to be a cut above what normal technology can do, yet if you actually scale mega-damage values against the few stated examples of an actual muzzle energy measurement, even the humble AK-47 or M-16 can be a mega-damage weapon. Think, for a moment, about how very against the definition of a mega-damage weapon that is. From the description, these are supposed to be weapons on the wrong side of the chunky salsa rule, and while an AK will certainly kill you or me dead with a hit in the right place, it won't paint the landscape with liquidized person the way a mega-damage weapon is supposed to. Likewise, there's no parity between the Megaversal settings. Ships in RIFTS are described as being able to singlehandedly destroy planets with just a few shots of weapons that are far less powerful than the basic gun turrets of a Zentradi warship, and millions of those ships are needed to glass a planet. Because there's no consistency in Palladium's multiversal games, any Macross stats I made by keeping them as close to the official info as possible would STILL be biased by the game I chose as the starting point. The Macross info is more than sufficient for a comparison on its side... the problem is a lack of sufficient and consistent detail on Palladium's side. Of course, there are also a few areas in which it's hard to provide a direct comparison because of fundamentally incompatible technologies. Computers are one. Macross's computers are not derivative of human-developed computer technology, they don't use the traditional von Neumann stored program architecture. CS's computers in RIFTS ARE human-developed computer technology, and thus almost certainly an application of von Neumann's architecture taken to a future-tech extreme. That very incompatibility in the most basic level of design is a telling point... and why I say that a Digital Reaper would almost certainly find an overtechnology-based computer system's HARDWARE the obstacle keeping him out, moreso than any software security. |
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Post by MacrossMike on Apr 12, 2014 16:29:07 GMT
Ok, valid points. I suspect part of the disparity in Palladium numbers is Kevin's ideas of game balance, it's no fun if your character dies from just one shot, right? [...] With the best will in the world, I don't think those disparities are intentional. I think Kevin and company have just written so many books that they've given up any pretense of trying to maintain internal consistency. It's certainly no fun if you character dies messily after one shot, but considering the whole mega-damage concept, it's pretty realistic. The very idea of mega-damage body armor is flawed, due to the physics involved. Even if the armor doesn't buckle, a lot of the energy of the shot is going to be transferred to the wearer anyway... which could lead to an intact suit of armor full of broken meat. Comparatively speaking I found Macross II's info closer to "real" in some respects, even though it fell short of the reality. I might argue that even the numbers you translate for the Mecha Manual are some what arbitrary too as you're going from what the authors and creators envision, but they're STILL far and away the best when compared to Palladium. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Palladium presented almost everything in their RPG for Macross II inaccurately... right down to what year it took place in. Macross is a setting where pretty much everything is enormously powerful compared to modern technology. What Palladium put in its stats doesn't reflect any continuity between Macross II and Macross... or any understanding of the setting itself. It makes no sense to assert that the VF-2JA couldn't fly in battroid mode when it weighs about the same as a VF-1, but has more than 2x what the VF-1 had for engine power. The ships... they forget that these ships are so well-built that they're repeatedly shown to be capable of not only surviving a fall out of orbit at hypersonic speeds (we're talking Mach 22 here) and smashing into a planet, but remaining mostly intact in the process. Dealing meaningful damage to a ship that can soak the kind of punishment involved in an extinction-event meteor strike takes a colossal energy input... which is why starship gun turrets in Macross are dimension weapons firing beams of fusion plasma at nearly light speed, and the reason the UN Forces are so fond of thermonuclear reaction warheads. It doesn't tally at all with the presentation of those guns in the Macross II RPG as being little better than a fighter's gun pod in range or firepower or worse than the Valkyrie II's anti-ship railgun. The large, bow-firing, bombardment-scale converging beam cannons are closer to accurate... since they are, in effect, so nasty that they'll literally VAPORIZE whole cities. Even the most powerful nuclear fusion weaponry humanity has yet built can't even come close to that, even with 50+ megaton nightmare-bombs like Tsar Bomba. Those, of course, the RPG presents as "power overwhelming" to the extent that nothing in the path of the beam can withstand it. Where Macross II goes completely off the hook is in showing us that there are ships in that setting which can repel city-erasing fusion firepower on a biblical scale and suffer only scorch marks. Very little of what's in that book is in any way reflective of the Macross II: Lovers Again OVA or Macross as a whole. In that light, it's rather unsurprising that even the official Macross encyclopedia refuses to even acknowledge the Palladium RPG's existence. As far as the content of the Macross Mecha Manual, that presents a highly distilled set of factoids taken directly from Macross's official publications and production materials. We're not out to write a technical essay for each craft, just to present the bare-bones history of the craft and its basic capabilities using the materials that went into the production of the show itself. I've met others who range those numbers upwards at times, but not often. Again as far as translations go my only real issue (and we've touched upon it before, so no need to belabor it) is just that I would like MORE info instead of the often used "many x something" where there's no info). Every Macross fan who writes their own stats approaches the question of scaling things differently... because the Palladium system is so ill-suited to the setting. Some fans use the MDC values there as a starting point and scale preceding models down, or start with the VF-1 and go up, or adjust them in other ways. The problem is the utterly arbitrary nature of the Mega-Damage system itself that prevents and kind of consistent approach to the subject. The whole "Many X" thing is a simple function of the fact that it's rare for a mechanical designer to lavish ultra-detailed specs on anything besides the most important designs of a series. If the design is never going to be examined in such detail that knowing the exact numbers of gun turrets or what have you, or there's variation between two examples of the same type, there's no point in citing a specific number. The smaller the ship, the easier it is to cover it in detail. Take, for instance, the Nupetiet Vergnitzs-class battleships at 4km versus the Northampton-class frigates... the smaller ship has the more detailed spec because you WILL see the 250m craft close enough to notice, while the 4km battleship is so large that the gun turrets are minuscule and impossible to draw consistently at that scale. "Many X" is a way for the animators to not drive themselves insane... especially if the ship is never going to be firing guns in quantities below "a shitload". It's not US deciding the "Many X", we're just distilling what's already on the creator's own production notes and the animation model sheets that the animators used to produce the show. It's hard to do a design for a ship that huge in that level of detail... I mean, consider that a Zentradi battleship is several kilometers long, but their mobile fortresses are the size of small moons. You don't do a gun turret count for a ship like that... it's not possible. We still haven't addressed the issue of the Psionics and the advantages they might give a Digital Reaper in understanding the tech, also what benefits might be had if there are crewmen aboard who are still alive? Using psionics to help understand the technology might help the Digital Reaper understand exactly why he's not able to connect to those systems and possibly, given enough time (weeks, months, maybe years, depending on how well-connected he is) patch together a means to connect his systems to the alien-derived ones. Surviving crew? I suppose that depends largely upon who those crew are. If it's Zentradi, he's probably royally screwed. They'll kill the Digital Reaper if he behaves as an enemy. If it's humans? They'd probably still refuse to help a potential enemy. |
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Post by Deleted on Apr 12, 2014 21:01:16 GMT
Sorry I thought you recalled that I was using the Macross II U.N. Space Forces ships, specifically the carrier vessel, the Heracles class.
The premise is that this is one of the ships involved in the defense of Earth vs the Marduk, they had a misfold and wound up in the 3Galaxies during the Dimensional Ourbreak scenario and were boarded by demons, in an effort to escape this new battlefield, and these new enemies, the executed yet another fold which, due to the diemnsional distortions of the 3G system they were thrown to Rifts Earth wherein they lsot control of the vessel, briefly, due to the demons on board and executed a semi-controlled crash landing on Rifts Earth on the boarder of CS Chi-town (the state) and the Federation of Magic. The PCs are CS personnel tasked with securing this vessel, or destroying it to keep it out of the hands of the Fed. of Magic, all of the fighting is going to be against the demons and helping to rescue the surviving crew (crew is reduced to approx. 1/3rd due to the battle damage during the Marduk battle and further casusalties from the demon's attacks. They're down to about 4 mecha in by the tine the CS arrive to "help", 3 Valkyries and 1 Destroid (Tomahawk).
The PCs are a CS Special Forces Soldier, a CS Military Specialist and a female Dog Boy Medic. They are backed up by about 50 soldiers, half of whom are my own "Wolf Pack", a CS Dog Boy group that comprises some nasty NPCs who specialize in not just killing demons & the supernatural they're also good at dealing w/ tech forces as well. The Spec Forces soldier is running in a modded GB Killer, the Mil SPec is using a Spec Forces SAMAS, they've got a Hellraiser and a retrofitted Iron Hammer MBT. The Wolf Pack are all wearing CA6 -EX armor (customized) and using some extremely "non standard" gear (Naruni Plasma Gatling for example) and other heavy weapons (they all just came off of "clean up" deployment at Tolkeen after the war). The rest of the soldiers are also CS Special Forces or CS Commando using heavy Power Armor. The Digital Reaper is yet another NPC.
I'm testing this on my group for the upcoming Unofficial and next years Official Open House.
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Post by MacrossMike on Apr 12, 2014 21:23:35 GMT
Sorry I thought you recalled that I was using the Macross II U.N. Space Forces ships, specifically the carrier vessel, the Heracles class. Ah, yeah... though I would point out that the (mis)identification of the Heracles-class as an aircraft carrier is one of the many idiotic errors which the Palladium RPG is often mocked for. The actual description of the ship has it as a "Large Battleship", which it is. The UN Spacy in Macross II: Lovers Again's universe adopted a lot of Zentradi fleet doctrine into its force organization after the first space war, due in large measure to Commander Vrlitwhai 7018's stint as a fleet admiral during the postwar recovery of the fleet and the many Zentradi fleets which have been inducted into the UN Forces after being defeated by the UN Spacy. As a result, there are very few dedicated aircraft carriers in the UN Spacy's fleet... almost all of which are converted Zentradi ships of the line. The PCs are CS personnel tasked with securing this vessel, or destroying it to keep it out of the hands of the Fed. of Magic, all of the fighting is going to be against the demons and helping to rescue the surviving crew (crew is reduced to approx. 1/3rd due to the battle damage during the Marduk battle and further casusalties from the demon's attacks. They're down to about 4 mecha in by the tine the CS arrive to "help", 3 Valkyries and 1 Destroid (Tomahawk). Hmm... while all UN Spacy ships are effectively atmosphere capable, the Heracles-class was probably not equipped with many atmosphere optimized Valkyries like the VF-2JA Icarus. Its forces would've been mainly organized around space defense. Also, isn't just four mecha to defend a ship three quarters of a mile long which probably has a crew of a couple thousand pushing it? That isn't what you'd call a small target. I'd give the poor PCs some support, unless something about the ship's fold drive and/or barrier system repels demons. (It wouldn't be all that surprising if either did, since both operate by changing the geometry of space-time.) |
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Post by Deleted on Apr 12, 2014 21:45:33 GMT
My bad I was filling in details when you responded. The 4 mecha are all that's LEFT after the initial Marduk fight and the demon assault, the Valkyries are pretty beat up too. Here's the rest of the details;
I kinda figure that the ship's crew will be pretty grateful for ANY help and the CS will look pretty good after those demons (who are slaughtering crew for the purpose of summoning a demon planet this this region of space!). Some of the crew are safe behind Pinpoint Barrier reinforced bulkheads on the bridge and in Engineering and few other locations.
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Post by MacrossMike on Apr 12, 2014 23:54:24 GMT
I kinda figure that the ship's crew will be pretty grateful for ANY help and the CS will look pretty good after those demons (who are slaughtering crew for the purpose of summoning a demon planet this this region of space!). Some of the crew are safe behind Pinpoint Barrier reinforced bulkheads on the bridge and in Engineering and few other locations. ... ... ... Y'know, for a while there I thought this idea sounded really, uncannily familiar. A few minutes ago, I realized why. Take out the RIFTS references, and what we have here is the plot of a Warhammer 40,000 novel... specifically, it's the Horus Heresy novel Fear to Tread. 's that a coincidence, or something you did on purpose? (I love me some WH40K, so I wouldn't say it's a bad thing.) Just out of vague curiosity, what Valkyries are you actually going to have left intact? |
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Post by Deleted on Apr 13, 2014 0:12:47 GMT
:DActually my roommate is into 40k, not me. I came up w/ the idea at random. I'm using the VF-2SS (3 of them) and a single Tomahawk II (correcting myself, they're what's left AFTER the demons assault).
Forgot to mention the 20 FASSAR -30s as well. I knad plan on this being a bit of a slog through the ship, having to traverse some damaged sections and fight the random encounter with demons, wether the ship & crew survives is (of course) up to the PCs.
Any other thoughts on it?
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Post by MacrossMike on Apr 13, 2014 3:28:25 GMT
:DActually my roommate is into 40k, not me. I came up w/ the idea at random. lol, what a random freaking coincidence. The Warhammer 40,000: Horus Heresy novel Fear to Tread has a very similar plot. The Imperial Astartes IX Legion flagship Red Tear came under daemonic attack after a warp jump and was separated from its escort fleet, crashing on the surface of Signus Prime in the no man's land left by a previous war. The Red Tear's much-diminished crew and the ground troops it was carrying, aided by the survivors of a ship which crashed on another planet in the system, end up under attack by the Chaos forces occupying that planet. It's one of the seriously important battles of the Horus Heresy, and a big part of the IX Legion's lore for the tabletop game. I'm using the VF-2SS (3 of them) and a single Tomahawk II (correcting myself, they're what's left AFTER the demons assault). That... might be a little problematic. Most of the Valkyrie II's weaponry is tied up in the Super Armed Pack, and because the Valkyrie II is the UN Forces' space-optimized variable fighter it's not 100% clear whether or not the Super Armed Pack can be used in atmosphere. For some types of FAST pack, there is canon evidence that flight is at least possible (though not necessarily graceful) in atmosphere, like the VF-1's Super Pack. The only catch is that the one time the Valkyrie II w/ SAP was shown flying in atmosphere was in Macross Ultimate Frontier for the PSP, which is not canon. It's known that the VF-2SS CAN mag-lock its medium railgun to the underside of its fuselage in atmospheric flight if it's not equipping its Super Armed Pack, though that severely limits its armament. I would say it's probably possible that the Valkyrie II could use its Super Armed Pack in atmosphere, but I doubt it could use many of the airframe's more exceptional design features like hypersonic flight with that asymmetrical drag profile. Also, while the Super Armed Pack's actually shockingly light (as in, only a few tonnes), but it probably wouldn't enhance the VF-2SS's physical agility on the ground. The Tomahawk II destroid should do fine, tho... that's designed to operate on the ground or on the hull of a ship. Forgot to mention the 20 FASSAR -30s as well. I knad plan on this being a bit of a slog through the ship, having to traverse some damaged sections and fight the random encounter with demons, wether the ship & crew survives is (of course) up to the PCs. Any other thoughts on it? Well... being that the Heracles-class was designed purely for a human-scale crew, there aren't likely to be many companionways or other corridors that you could get a Tomahawk II or Valkyrie II into. The Valkyrie II's actually pretty damn small by Macross standards (it's the second or third smallest VF overall) but in battroid it's still 14 meters tall and plenty wide in GERWALK mode. |
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Post by Deleted on Apr 13, 2014 11:57:57 GMT
I use the rules that say the 2SS can fly in atmo, but at the reduced speeds,but I don't diminish ground bonuses as I think that's a fair trade off. I also rule that the ship has adjustable AG so the crew is mucking w/ the demons by alternately increasing and decreasing the gravity to slow their progress.
I tend to hodge podge things a bit, I use the Macross II deck plans (the only ones we've got y'know) for the ship itself so the Valkyries and the Tomahawk are in the large open sections of the ship and the crew that's managed to hide is holed up in engineering and on the bridge desperately trying to get the ship up again and figure out how to get rid of the demons (of course they don't realize excatly WHAT these boarders are, so they're having a little trouble).
As an aside one of the BIG areas I disagree with the creators and translation notes is the space speeds of the vessels is this idea that the ships can only do Mach speeds in space (I know, it's what THEY say so you've no control over it). So I modify things and say that the ships are capable of sublight speeds up to .25c. I figure that if the OT is THAT powerful it's even possible the ships could reach .99 (Repeating) of light speed, but that .25c is their AVERAGE insystem cruising speed and the slower Mach speeds are for docking maneuvers.
The idea of the crew and the CS personnel having to work together (as in the story from WH40K is one I might also apply for something later, thx!).
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Post by MacrossMike on Apr 13, 2014 17:43:42 GMT
I use the rules that say the 2SS can fly in atmo, but at the reduced speeds,but I don't diminish ground bonuses as I think that's a fair trade off. Well, to be fair... the VF-2SS Valkyrie II is perfectly capable of atmospheric flight on its own. In fact, the VF-2SS and VF-2JA were both derived from a single, common, all-regime platform (the VF-2) that was the main fighter for something like ten years before the UN Forces had the VF-2S modified into a space-optimized VF and made that their new main fighter. The VF-2SS, which is much closer to the VF-2's original design, has lost nothing in terms of its atmospheric flight capabilities and can still top out at speeds in excess of Mach 5.5 per the official stats. The VF-2JA is a later, and much more heavily modified, derivative of the VF-2's -J variant that was optimized for atmospheric combat and cost-effectiveness. The only real point of unclear-ness is whether the Valkyrie II's Super Armed Pack degrades atmospheric performance to the point that the pack can't be equipped in atmosphere. Macross II's creators never said yea or nay on that, and one Macross video game did say yea for that. I also rule that the ship has adjustable AG so the crew is mucking w/ the demons by alternately increasing and decreasing the gravity to slow their progress. That's a house rule that is 100% in keeping with canon Macross. Every ship with an artificial gravity system (which is every ship) has the ability to manipulate the intensity of the gravity. Depending on the size of the ship, the gravity control may be a single system which has responsibility for the entire ship (only the very smallest ~200m ships), or it can be a distributed network of gravity control systems that're variable enough for different parts of a ship to have different gravity levels. We actually see this demonstrated in Macross Frontier's first episode, where the corridor from the disembarkation area in Island-1 is a microgravity environment but once they reach the main areas of the ship, the gravity changes to a normal, Earth-like gravity. (This sort of extremely precise gravity control is how the UN Forces manage carrier launches and landings in space... there's a low gravity field projected over the carrier deck that allows people and vehicles to remain on the carrier deck in space, and to permit craft to make a rough imitation of a regular carrier landing in space as well. It's also how they make multi-tier, multi-directional cities inside of their ships, like we see on the Macross in DYRL? and Island-1 in Macross Frontier's movies.) As an aside one of the BIG areas I disagree with the creators and translation notes is the space speeds of the vessels is this idea that the ships can only do Mach speeds in space (I know, it's what THEY say so you've no control over it). So I modify things and say that the ships are capable of sublight speeds up to .25c. I figure that if the OT is THAT powerful it's even possible the ships could reach .99 (Repeating) of light speed, but that .25c is their AVERAGE insystem cruising speed and the slower Mach speeds are for docking maneuvers. Well... I have good news and bad news for you, then. That shit ain't from any Japanese source.You're also massively overestimating their cruising speeds.The speeds listed in the Macross II RPG are complete ass-pulls by the writers at Palladium Books and have no connection to ANYTHING in Macross. On the one hand, the timeline of the first space war indicates that the Macross needed approximately ten months to cruise, by sublight drive only, back to Earth from the vicinity of Pluto. Their course during that period between February and November 2009 wasn't exactly straight either, thanks to brief stopoffs at Saturn and Mars. If you're in the mood for a little rocket science, the Macross cruised back to Earth across a distance well in excess of 28 AU over just 10 months. That means that the ship's bare minimum velocity must have been 160 kilometers per second. The course they actually took is more like 38 AU, meaning their speed, barring stops, was more like 216 kilometers per second (or Mach 635). It's pretty much a given all ships in Macross can probably match this feat if they have the fuel stocks and supplies necessary for a 10 month cruise. Mind you, "top speed (in space)" is a load of horseshit because space physics do not work that way... but this ~220km/s speed can be taken as a "top speed" for reasonable distances in space without unduly depleting their fuel stores. The data available on the Mars Return Fleet, a fleet which was destroyed by a hijacked Oberth-class destroyer while returning the staff of Mars Base to Earth, backs this up. (This is where Misa's lover Riber Fruhling died, and the destruction of the hijacked destroyer the first space battle that made Bruno J. Global famous.) To put it in perspective for you, 220km/s is roughly 0.00073c. HOWEVER... Ships in the Macross universe(s) DO NOT, as a rule, attempt to cover interplanetary distances on sublight drives except in the very direst circumstances. Why not? Because it's a huge f*cking waste of time, of energy, and of fuel compared to getting there RIGHT NOW by fold jump. It can take weeks under sublight power to travel from Earth to Mars or vice versa (about four, all told). If you cover that same distance by fold jump, your tedious four-week, 225 million kilometer cruise is reduced to a short hop barely a second long. The trip back from Pluto, if you had a fold drive? Again, about 1 second. Want to go to a solar system 12 light years away? Not even 2 hours. About the only travel between two stellar bodies that ISN'T handled by fold jump is travel between Earth and Luna, or between Earth or Luna and any installations in the same orbit as Luna (like the New Frontier shipyards or the L-5 Manufacturing Station). If the distance is long enough that it's gonna take you more than a few hours or days to get there by sublight, why get there at 0.00073c when you can get there at about 55,000c? |
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Post by Deleted on Apr 13, 2014 19:26:40 GMT
Agreed. That's what fold drives are for, of course (siily humans, sublight is for kids!)  I figure that the main power plant of the ships provide a continuous power source (I call them Plasma Induction Furnaces insted of "ThermoNuclear Heat Pile Reactors") this is fed by the seperate fusion furnace's waste plasma and the main computer helps regulate and maintain the magnetic "bottles" (or so my House rules go). So by my estimation they could reach a "amx speed" of .99c (repeating) IF they continued to provide thrust.At least that's My Theory based upon My Thoughts if they've got AG fields so they can neutralize the issues thrust normally casues.  |
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Post by MacrossMike on Apr 13, 2014 20:18:04 GMT
That's what fold drives are for, of course (siily humans, sublight is for kids!) Yep! That's why, even though the Heracles was in the Sol system when the Mardook attacked, it still fold-jumped to the front lines rather than cruising there. The battle would've been long over by the time reached Mars. It's also why later main-timeline Macross titles have a fighter-scale fold system that can be used to move advance teams into hostile areas without a carrier or let fighters run sorties against a distant enemy. I figure that the main power plant of the ships provide a continuous power source (I call them Plasma Induction Furnaces insted of "ThermoNuclear Heat Pile Reactors") this is fed by the seperate fusion furnace's waste plasma and the main computer helps regulate and maintain the magnetic "bottles" (or so my House rules go). Er... that's actually a lot of unnecessary complexity and a lot less safe than what the thermonuclear reaction heat pile systems normally achieve. All thermonuclear reaction power systems keep their pseudo-fusion reactions going in artificial pockets of 10+ dimension space which is also what permits the reaction to be sustained so easily, to generate vast amounts of energy from tiny amounts of fuel, and to work without producing any harmful radiation. They ARE a continuous power source. They're also fail-safe... if the reactor is breached, without being forced into an overload state, all you get is a smallish puff of plasma and the reaction stops immediately. That's why you don't see VFs going up in massive explosions when they're shot down the way you do with Mobile Suits. It's not one big reactor either, like they do in Star Trek. It's a couple clusters of smaller reactors running below their maximum output to meet the ship's energy needs with a significant surplus so that they can take up the slack if one reactor or one cluster is taken down for service or by battle damage. The modular warships like the Battle-class ships and Macross Quarter-class assault carriers take this to an extreme... as each module is essentially able to operate as a ship in its own right, totally decentralizing the power systems of the overall combined ship. Even the Macross-class can do this, though it's the main ship and then the ships forming the arms. So by my estimation they could reach a "amx speed" of .99c (repeating) IF they continued to provide thrust.At least that's My Theory based upon My Thoughts if they've got AG fields so they can neutralize the issues thrust normally casues. Eh... I wouldn't go that far. Just the sheer amount of energy necessary to accelerate an object to near light-speed is almost infinite, and while the ship's thermonuclear reaction heat piles are putting out thousands of gigawatts each, that's a lot less than infinity. Most of the ships don't accelerate that quickly either... an instantaneous acceleration of ~2G on a ship that size is nothing to sneeze at, but to get a ship like that moving at almost the speed of light would take a run-up of YEARS and more fuel than the ships carry. |
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Post by Deleted on Apr 13, 2014 23:37:05 GMT
Eh, Like I said that's just how I figured things in my own head, it's easier for me to convert it than to use their systems. I know it sounds backwards, but it's just the way I did things. Also everytime I heard the words "Thermonuclear" I kept imagining nukes, so I changed it to something else while keeping the 10+ dimension stuff.
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Post by Jaymz on Apr 13, 2014 23:59:26 GMT
Hey now! I think my conversions into Palladium is as close as anyone will ever get to accurate  I only keep "space speeds" for simplicity sake |
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Post by MacrossMike on Apr 14, 2014 4:56:44 GMT
Eh, Like I said that's just how I figured things in my own head, it's easier for me to convert it than to use their systems. I know it sounds backwards, but it's just the way I did things. Also everytime I heard the words "Thermonuclear" I kept imagining nukes, so I changed it to something else while keeping the 10+ dimension stuff. 's probably because we developed thermonuclear weaponry before we developed thermonuclear power... so people commonly associate it more with detonations than a continuous power source. The thermonuclear reaction power systems are continuous generation... and are almost, in practice, maintaining a tiny star in a pocket of higher-dimension space as their power generation method. Amusingly, Macross has humanity figuring out the peaceful use of thermonuclear reaction OT long before figuring out its destructive potential. The warheads are something terrifying though... basically a fallout-free pure fusion warhead that summons a massive plasma fireball onto the battlefield. The only thing more terrifying than a WMD is a WMD that's consequence-free. What's really unusual is how blase the UN Forces in Macross II seem to be about using 'em in combat. It actually goes back to DYRL, in which the VF-1 Valkyries almost always sortie with the RMS-1 reaction missiles, but even the Valkyrie II's micro-missiles seem to use the same visual effect as a thermonuclear reaction warhead... which is a REALLY scary thought. Hey now! I think my conversions into Palladium is as close as anyone will ever get to accurate I only keep "space speeds" for simplicity sake As long as they're using the Palladium system, yeah... the system just isn't suited to Macross. Especially their paradoxical belief that the micro-missiles aren't guided. |
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Post by Jaymz on Apr 14, 2014 9:18:54 GMT
Precisely. Now if I were doing it in say d6 or mekton.... (That is in the works eventually) I can get that much closer.....
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Post by Deleted on Apr 14, 2014 11:35:30 GMT
Well, oddly enough, that's what the Plasma Induction Furnace is, as it's using the inital fusion reaction to generate the plasma it is very much like having a star in your pocket as a power source. Yup! That's why I'm using those designs for my game. Are you familiar wiht SteelFalcon's work for Macross and RT? Here's his link Just In Case. www.steelfalcon.com/Unfortunately the last updates to his site are dated '97 or '98 and many of the other links are now broken. |
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Post by Jaymz on Apr 14, 2014 15:13:33 GMT
Oh I know steel falcon well. Unfortunately like Sketchleys stats they are in several cases quite inaccurate thus my own versions .....
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Post by MacrossMike on Apr 14, 2014 15:25:13 GMT
Precisely. Now if I were doing it in say d6 or mekton.... (That is in the works eventually) I can get that much closer..... Being that there are parts of the Palladium system I like and parts I don't, I prefer to stitch together my own game system by taking what bits I like from a few different games... mainly Palladium and Dark Heresy. Well, oddly enough, that's what the Plasma Induction Furnace is, as it's using the inital fusion reaction to generate the plasma it is very much like having a star in your pocket as a power source. ... err... um... how is that different from a normal fusion power system? Yup! That's why I'm using those designs for my game. Are you familiar wiht SteelFalcon's work for Macross and RT? Here's his link Just In Case. www.steelfalcon.com/Unfortunately the last updates to his site are dated '97 or '98 and many of the other links are now broken. Oh yes, I'm familiar with the SteelFalcon website. It was one of the first, fumbling steps towards something resembling accurate stats for Macross mecha in the Palladium system. The problem is that, accuracy-wise, it left a lot to be desired even back in the late 1990s. Here, now, in 2014 its version of the lore is pretty badly outdated. I have no idea what the hell they were thinking when they did some of the stuff like claiming the Macross version of the GU-11 held 600 55mm rounds and the Robotech version held 200 but was a clip-fed weapon. That's all kinds of impossible considering how large that all those 55mm rounds are, and where the GU-11 keeps its internal ammo feed. They list a lot of nonsense, and a lot of things are listed in there with incorrect names... the VF-5000 "Atmospheric Valkyrie" is really VF-5000 Star Mirage, the VA-14 doesn't have a name (it's not likely that it has one of its own, as it's an attack variant of the VF-14 Vampire), what they're calling the Ark Royal-class has never been called anything but Uraga-class in official material, the Clemenceau-class they list is really the Guantanamo-class, the Sentinel-class on their page is really the Valhalla III-type, and they're inexplicably assuming (with zero evidence) that the Varauta ships seen in Macross 7 were Protoculture-designed ships. (They're actually human-built, and were formerly the system defense fleet of the Varauta system.) |
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Post by Deleted on Apr 15, 2014 11:11:28 GMT
The plasma furnace is many times more powerful than your standard fusion furnace. Though the result is simlar to that of the sun, it doesn't actually "fuse" anything, it's just taking the power of the waste plasma generated by the "regular" fusion furnaces and harnessing it for both power and drive functions.
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Post by Jaymz on Apr 15, 2014 13:28:41 GMT
One thing I am thinking of tweaking (Mike you and I will need to have a discussion on this if I do it) is how much the ECA affects each VF and how much in each mode. Example - IIRC in Fighter mode the VF-1 can't use it, Gerwalk is like 50% while Battroid is 100% (My initial thoughts are take my present MDC of 360 and half it in fighter mode for 180 MDC and 3/4 in Gerwalk for 270 if I am remembering correctly) How is this relevant? Well if one COULD hack an opponents computer (unlikely while in combat) could one not shut down the ECA? > |
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Post by MacrossMike on Apr 15, 2014 15:26:56 GMT
The plasma furnace is many times more powerful than your standard fusion furnace. Though the result is simlar to that of the sun, it doesn't actually "fuse" anything, it's just taking the power of the waste plasma generated by the "regular" fusion furnaces and harnessing it for both power and drive functions. Err... that doesn't make sense, from either a physics standpoint or a practicality standpoint. Why would the waste plasma from a fusion reactor, which has already had the vast majority of its energy harnessed for power generation, produce many times more power than the fusion reaction itself? The ONLY way that makes any sense at all is if the fusion reactor itself is complete crap and is failing to harness almost all of the energy of the fusion reaction. Otherwise, that's impossible because you'd have to be violating conservation of energy. It sounds like someone at Palladium was trying to rip off Warhammer 40,000 plasma reactor technology and botched the explanation... or fusion reactors in RIFTS are such complete shit that even our abortive efforts at them today are better by far. Either way, it'd be a completely unnecessary addition in Macross... and probably wouldn't work with a thermonuclear reaction power plant anyway. A thermonuclear reaction furnace is an extremely efficient power source, harnessing virtually all of the energy produced from its dimensionally-regulated pseudo-fusion reaction and sustaining that reaction with minuscule amounts of fuel. Just to give you perspective when it comes to how fuel-efficient these systems are, a VF-1 going balls-out in atmospheric flight is, based on available info, consuming mere grams of fuel per minute (and it carries 120kg). By the time the plasma is expelled from the reaction furnace, it's already been used for power generation to the point that it's not useful anymore for that, and is usually directed as propellant for a plasma ion engine. The approach isn't all that different from Star Trek's impulse reactors. (In short, it already does everything the plasma induction furnace thingy does, but it does it BETTER and with less complexity.) One thing I am thinking of tweaking (Mike you and I will need to have a discussion on this if I do it) is how much the ECA affects each VF and how much in each mode. Example - IIRC in Fighter mode the VF-1 can't use it, Gerwalk is like 50% while Battroid is 100% (My initial thoughts are take my present MDC of 360 and half it in fighter mode for 180 MDC and 3/4 in Gerwalk for 270 if I am remembering correctly) That's because that's a tricky thing to balance at the best of times, and there are a bunch of factors to consider. Like that the VF-0, with its energy conversion armor not operating, was marginally tougher than your average fighter aircraft as-is thanks mainly to its early test-type overtechnology composites. At full power, that same, thin aircraft skin was comparable in durability to heavy armor from a modern main battle tank... and that's just using power generated by overtuned conventional jet turbines. Go to the opposite extreme, and you have the VF-25 boasting Advanced ECA on some of its option packs that is described as having the same defensive capabilities as the armor of a ship of the line. Then you've got starships that use energy conversion armor... My favored mechanic is to leave the MDC values to reflect the basic structural integrity and system health of the fighter itself, and have ECA represented by incoming damage scaling. This works well with another defensive measure, anti-beam coatings, which also deduct a percentage from the damage of energy weapons before they deal damage to armor. So a VF-25 being shot at with a beam machine gun might suffer, for a hit, Damage - 30% for the anti-beam coating and then divided that by 1, 2, or 5 to represent the charge state of the energy conversion armor. All told, you need a couple different sets of scaling factors to account for regular energy conversion armor, fighters with abnormally thick energy conversion armor (e.g. the YF-29 Durandal/YF-29B Percival), layered energy conversion armor (like the kind used on antiprojectile shields prior to the 5th Generation), and advanced energy conversion armor (5th Gen VF shields, Armored/Tornado/Paladin pack). On top of that, the most recent designs also throw fold wave systems into the mix just to mess with us, since those also affect the armor. How is this relevant? Well if one COULD hack an opponents computer (unlikely while in combat) could one not shut down the ECA? > Unlikely, IMO... vital systems are usually kept isolated from communications channels that could be compromised, and that's a pretty vital system. |
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