The EBSIS

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Re: The EBSIS

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

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

I am not saying that at the official level they are are AUs (only HG can do that), I am saying at the fan level it makes more sense to organize it into AUs.

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

Even by today's standards, I wouldn't dismiss a force of that size. However the question does have to be considered why Scott thought a force of 6000 troops (w/2000 Veritechs) "can't lose." Seriously that is what he said. They can't lose. Scott's mental state though means we can't be sure how representative that is of the overall manpower pool.

Going by the OSM numbers for the ships while it changes things early on, but it can and will fail when one starts to factor in things that where not part of my initial tally from a previous thread. There are a host of factors/events my previous tally did not even attempt to address at the time.
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Re: The EBSIS

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

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



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

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

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



I would disagree, and this is one reason (beyond many others) why robotech became such a flash in the pan.

Star Trek has a metric ton of "alternate settings" with the IP holders being fine with that, simply stating that canon is what you see in the movies.

Disney, while devcanonizing a lot of the EU star wars material, continues to publish it, and has no issue with that separate setting "existing" and of course for the longest time, the star wars IP holders weren't really concerned with the validity of canon, beyond the actual movies.

For robotech, As bad as some of the products in the 1990s were, at least they were out there. As much as the EBSIS might not work with canon, at least it was out there as part of a growing and popular product line.

Since HG has started enforcing canon--what have we seen?

Well, the most pertinent answer might be: what haven't we seen? We had one egregiously bad comic that I'm not certain if it was supposed to be canon, not canon, or the result so a bad acid trip given that the time travel and such was closer to a weird Dr. Who episode than rogbotech. We've had a few game books, which died because in canon, there's really not much to do. We had a trickle of HG stuff that eventually died, but even before that ran into the issue of the demands to stick with a canon that was just unfriendly to any kind of campaign.

Now granted ,some of this was due to HG's desperation to avoid touching te most popular era--MAcross, which is probably wh7y the EBSIS was popular since it was the time period where you could play around with veritechs and Rick Hunter as active parts of the game.

Put simply--canon is highly overrated and often, from a marketing point of view, a terrible idea.
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Re: The EBSIS

Unread post by Seto Kaiba »

ShadowLogan wrote:I am not saying that at the official level they are are AUs (only HG can do that), I am saying at the fan level it makes more sense to organize it into AUs.

And I'm saying that it makes no sense to because it's 1. completely arbitrary and 2. misleading.


ShadowLogan wrote:Even by today's standards, I wouldn't dismiss a force of that size. However the question does have to be considered why Scott thought a force of 6000 troops (w/2000 Veritechs) "can't lose." Seriously that is what he said. They can't lose. Scott's mental state though means we can't be sure how representative that is of the overall manpower pool.

Really? As I said, it makes pretty reasonable sense in context with animation-correct stats.

In theory (in-universe), the 2nd Earth Reclamation Force was an Expeditionary Forces taskforce of such size that it was expected to liberate Earth by the simple expedient of attacking the headquarters of the Invid occupation with overwhelming force. With animation accurate numbers, that force was approximately six thousand fighting men and women.

Scott, having recently landed on Earth, is expecting to rendezvous at a surface muster point where he's expecting to find a composite force of survivors from his mission and the previous one nearly as large as the theoretically overwhelming force he was separated from at the start of the story.

Why does he think they can't lose? Simple, a force that size is meant to be sufficient to take a planet. It might actually have been enough to take a planet against the forces of the Invid Regent.

For that to be the case, it lends powerful support to the idea that Earth and humanity have a VERY small existing population that'd make the existence of something like EBSIS even more implausible than it already is.


ShadowLogan wrote:Going by the OSM numbers for the ships while it changes things early on, but it can and will fail when one starts to factor in things that where not part of my initial tally from a previous thread. There are a host of factors/events my previous tally did not even attempt to address at the time.

Even if it is not perfect, it is still an infinitely better solution than Wild Mass Guessing, especially when what little "evidence" that might contradict is is mostly of suspect origin or easily dismissible.

Like the one real piece of dialog that talks about population in the New Generation coming from a guy who's never been to Earth and has no idea what's going on down there.





mech798 wrote:d this is one reason (beyond many others) why robotech became such a flash in the pan.

Eh... if this counts at all, it's such a trivial contribution that it really doesn't make an appreciable difference. I'm gonna spoiler tag a lot of this because it's really getting off topic, but I owe your argument a proper response.


Spoiler:
mech798 wrote:Star Trek has a metric ton of "alternate settings" with the IP holders being fine with that, simply stating that canon is what you see in the movies.

Yes and no? Ever since Gene Roddenberry's falling out with Star Trek Star Fleet Technical Manual author Franz Joseph in the mid-70's, Star Trek has had a canon policy that only what is in the Star Trek TV shows and movies is canon.

Licensed novels, comics, games, etc. have been non-canon since that point with no real effort to codify them beyond "non-canon". With no real coordination between authors prior to the 2000s, most authors simply abandoned any attempt at inter-story continuity and made their stories as stand-alone episodic as most of Star Trek was at the time. Some novels, comics, or games do describe their own alternate settings but because of the heavily episodic nature of the beast they're never really referred to in those terms because they're stand-alone non-canon stories. It wasn't really until after 2000 that there was anything like a recognized alternate setting existing on an informal basis. Even then, there were only the two: the Pocket Books Star Trek Relaunch novelverse and the setting of Star Trek Online. The only reason that distinction was drawn is because both were ongoing storylines that were heavily serialized instead of episodic and so different from each other in almost every respect, so keeping them separate from each other and other material was a critical anti-frustration measure if you intended to discuss non-canon Star Trek material coming out.



mech798 wrote:Disney, while devcanonizing a lot of the EU star wars material, continues to publish it, and has no issue with that separate setting "existing" and of course for the longest time, the star wars IP holders weren't really concerned with the validity of canon, beyond the actual movies.

The whole brouhaha over the old Star Wars EU was because it was decanonized, not because of its canon status prior to that.

Disney continues to publish that material because they know even the fans that hate the new trilogy and the franchise's current direction will still buy reprints of that old material... in no small part due to many of them refusing to even acknowledge the validity of the new canon. It's monetizing denialism, it's not really lending any validity to the now non-canon material.



mech798 wrote:For robotech, As bad as some of the products in the 1990s were, at least they were out there. As much as the EBSIS might not work with canon, at least it was out there as part of a growing and popular product line.

That's... kind of at odds with objective reality, to be honest.

Robotech never had a large following. It was a bandwagon-jumper trying to get a piece of Hasbro's Transformers action, and it entered into a market already glutted by similar merchandise-driven cartoons. Its broadcast ratings were never better than middling and its merchandise lines sold poorly. Its expectations were built around a completely different demographic to the one that was actually watching it, and that hurt it in the near term and the long run. Efforts to get a movie and sequel series out met with failure due to mismanagement with a side of poor timing. Its merchandise efforts past that point can best be summed with two words: "Diminishing Returns".

The product lines weren't growing, they were shrinking. Worse, the low quality and inconsistency of what WAS coming out was making those products so contentious that by the time the fanbase went online in the late 90's they were basically little more than fodder for flame wars. The toxicity of the fanbase, combined with the poor quality of the licensed goods that were all that the franchise had to show for itself, ended up being a prime driver of the steady decline of the already-small fanbase. Palladium's original inclusions like EBSIS were small potatoes compared to some of the nonsense that came from the writers at Eternity/Malibu, Academy, and Antarctic, but it was still in poor taste and enough to drag it into the flame wars alongside the comics and novels.

The comics are probably the most visible indicator of how poorly Robotech's product line was performing. The sales volumes of Robotech comics were always low, in indie comic territory, but sales were always on the decline. Of the three Robotech comics publishers in the 1990's, only one - Malibu Comics - did not see its license revoked because of poor quality and poor sales. That's misleading too, though, because the reason it avoided that fate was it was bought out by Marvel Comics and Marvel decided to drop the Robotech license for the same reasons. The tenure of each successive licensee got shorter too, before Harmony Gold lost patience with the poor sales performance. Malibu had the license six years, Academy for three years, and Antarctic for two. The reason it looks like the second DC license lasted longer is because the lack of any titles in continuous serialization... it was all short-run limited edition comics.



mech798 wrote:Since HG has started enforcing canon--what have we seen?

Well, the most pertinent answer might be: what haven't we seen? We had one egregiously bad comic that I'm not certain if it was supposed to be canon, not canon, or the result so a bad acid trip given that the time travel and such was closer to a weird Dr. Who episode than rogbotech. We've had a few game books, which died because in canon, there's really not much to do. We had a trickle of HG stuff that eventually died, but even before that ran into the issue of the demands to stick with a canon that was just unfriendly to any kind of campaign.

Now granted ,some of this was due to HG's desperation to avoid touching te most popular era--MAcross, which is probably wh7y the EBSIS was popular since it was the time period where you could play around with veritechs and Rick Hunter as active parts of the game.

That's got more to do with Harmony Gold's own rather unrealistic estimation of Robotech's prospects than anything.

Harmony Gold rebooted and relaunched the Robotech franchise in the early 2000s with a specific goal of reinventing Robotech as a credible sci-fi/mecha anime property. They made a lot of their decisions by copying the best practices of the leaders in their chosen industry. Having an official canon was considered one of them. The problem they ran into is that that ship had already sailed quite a long time ago. Robotech was too old, too obviously dated, and too saddled with its (and Harmony Gold's) bad reputation to ever be taken seriously. Tommy Yune got his paltry budget for the first episode of the Shadow Saga OVA by selling his bosses on the dream that it would make Robotech mainstream and popular and that the rest of the project would be funded by investors it attracted from outside. It was a doomed undertaking from the start because he didn't the talent pool to do a proper job of it in-house and he didn't have the money to bring in outside talent to do the job properly for him. The first episode was written in-house, the animation farmed out to a cheap second-string team at a studio that mainly does tweening work for Japanese and American studios, and the voice actor costs were quite high because the returning cast are SAG members.

What we've seen since is the fallout of Robotech's third and apparently final failure to launch.

Robotech's plans for the future were all predicated on Tommy Yune's promises that the Shadow Saga would be a hit and would transform Robotech into a mainstream mecha anime title.

When it failed, all those plans went to pieces. They were left with no source of funding for the remaining episodes of the Shadow Saga and it was quietly cancelled in 2007. Plans for future comics and games and so on went unfulfilled because the franchise never raised its profile to attract new licensees. Palladium's 2nd Edition Macross Saga, Masters Saga, and New Generation games were meant to be a holding pattern while they waited for the second Shadow Saga episode that never materialized so they ran out of material. That those settings, when making an effort to actually resemble what's in the series proper, are somewhat barren for RPG purposes wouldn't have mattered quite so much because you were supposed to be getting a big, bold new setting full of space adventure as a result of the Shadow Saga's future developments so it wouldn't have mattered so much. Instead, we ended up revisiting where the franchise was in the 90's when the anything-goes licensing meant a trickle of increasingly poor quality merchandise that only the most dedicated fans were interested in buying. Problem is, there's not nearly as many of those fans as in the 90's, so the returns continue to diminish making the franchise less appealing to licensees as time goes on.

Now that point has become largely academic, since Harmony Gold has bent the knee and Big West is coming to release all of Macross and complete Robotech's long slide into irrelevance.

The reason EBSIS was better-received than some of the other material of the 90's had little to do with its actual merits. Like all of Robotech's least unsuccessful ventures, the book it was in met with relatively high enthusiasm because it was what we'll call Macross-adjacent. Most of the Robotech fandom was only really ever invested in the Macross Saga, which is why it dominates Robotech's merchandising so utterly. Harmony Gold and its licensees knew this, of course, which is why the vast majority of sequel efforts and licensing are either set during the Macross Saga's events, or prominently feature Macross Saga characters and/or mecha.

Only three of the eight main books in the "1st Edition" Robotech RPG (#4 Southern Cross, #5 Invid Invasion, and #6 Return of the Masters) and one of the four adventure books (#3 Lancer's Rockers) aren't set during or immediately after the Macross Saga. The Sentinels books also technically count, since the entire Sentinels arc is screwing around in close proximity to the continuing adventures of the holdover characters from the Macross Saga.



mech798 wrote:Put simply--canon is highly overrated and often, from a marketing point of view, a terrible idea.

For successful franchises, canon is often an invaluable marketing tool and something nearly essential for retaining a devoted fanbase who want to see continuity between stories and understand how the fictional universe fits together. Canon can sometimes be a powerful selling point in and of itself that can draw attention to new works that wouldn't otherwise be strong enough to stand on their own, or that are disliked by fans but tolerated precisely because of how they fit into canon. To give an example or two, Gundam ZZ is largely disliked by western audiences but is tolerated precisely due to its place in canon: connecting the beloved Zeta Gundam up to the nearly-as-beloved Char's Counterattack. Gundam Narrative also coasted on canon because of its direct connection to the much better-received Gundam Unicorn. Canon ultimately saved Star Trek from a major blow too. The J.J. Abrams movies were originally set to be a reboot, replacing the existing Star Trek material, but fan backlash saw them retooled into an alternate universe story... which was fortunate, because the new movies turned out to be commercially unsuccessful to the point that their investors pulled out after the third one leaving that branch of the property in limbo.

For unsuccessful franchises and failing media formats, canon can be an albatross around their neck as their existing fans can end up refusing to accept or acknowledge a reboot or retooling of the series aimed at making it appeal to a broader audience. Robotech falls into this category, where the small but fanatical fanbase refused to accept the reboot and ultimately the attempts to retool it into a property with broader appeal without sacrificing its existing audience failed.
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Re: The EBSIS

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Seto wrote:And I'm saying that it makes no sense to because it's 1. completely arbitrary and 2. misleading.

For some properties in that mess it isn't anywhere near arbitrary and makes sense to group things in that mess together that where made to work together (like the 21 Novels, or the ~14 1E RPG books, the comics are another matter AFAIK). Nor is it misleading given that what happens in one AU version does not canon make in another. Giving (for example) the Novels AU status doesn't mean suddenly Thinking Caps and the Shapings are suddenly canon in the TV Series (the same holds for the EBSIS and the 1E RPG).

Seto wrote:Scott, having recently landed on Earth, is expecting to rendezvous at a surface muster point where he's expecting to find a composite force of survivors from his mission and the previous one nearly as large as the theoretically overwhelming force he was separated from at the start of the story.

A 6000 strong force might take an Invid Regent World, but Scott saw a similar sized force just get curb stomped. And from a historical perspective he would know how well the exhausted ASC did (even w/UEEF assistance), or the 10th MD. The reality had not sunken in that 6000 troops where not an unbeatable force. Which means his enthusiasm could be misleading in terms of representative manpower.

Seto wrote:For that to be the case, it lends powerful support to the idea that Earth and humanity have a VERY small existing population that'd make the existence of something like EBSIS even more implausible than it already is.

The EBSIS only exists in the 1E RPG's Canon, which does have non-SDF-1 survivors of the RoD that are scattered across the globe. Which means there could be divisions within that overall society that cause the formation of independent states, possibly even to super power level because it is clear the survivors represented varying political/cultural-ideologies.

Seto wrote:Even if it is not perfect, it is still an infinitely better solution than Wild Mass Guessing, especially when what little "evidence" that might contradict is is mostly of suspect origin or easily dismissible.

Like the one real piece of dialog that talks about population in the New Generation coming from a guy who's never been to Earth and has no idea what's going on down there.

I would not consider this approach to be wild mass guessing, the initial assessment is based on screen counting which establishes a minimum (and isn't presented as anything but this). Now some of those screen counting need to be supplemented, but I am using the values HG says are supposed to be present using their approved material.

Here's the question worth considering, what made that guy in TSC think there are "millions" of people still on the planet? While it might be easy to just quickly dismiss him as having no idea what's going on, the question is still worth considering.
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Re: The EBSIS

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ShadowLogan wrote:For some properties in that mess it isn't anywhere near arbitrary and makes sense to group things in that mess together that where made to work together (like the 21 Novels, or the ~14 1E RPG books, the comics are another matter AFAIK).

Only if they're internally consistent. But even then, using a loaded term like "alternate universe" lends them an air of false legitimacy. It's easier, and more honest, to simply say "the McKinney novels", "the old RPG", or "works that Harmony Gold disowned due to poor quality". :roll:


ShadowLogan wrote:A 6000 strong force might take an Invid Regent World, but Scott saw a similar sized force just get curb stomped. And from a historical perspective he would know how well the exhausted ASC did (even w/UEEF assistance), or the 10th MD. The reality had not sunken in that 6000 troops where not an unbeatable force. Which means his enthusiasm could be misleading in terms of representative manpower.

Now, from an out-of-universe perspective the audience knows that the ASC, 1st ERF, and 2nd ERF were basically wiped out. Scott doesn't know what the audience knows, though. The UEEF didn't have much in the way of intelligence on the state of Earth until just before the end of the 3rd Robotech War and the survivors of the 1st and 2nd ERF who form Scott's resistance group were soldiers who had been isolated from the rest of their force after being shot down or their individual units were wiped out. Scott saw his section of the 2nd ERF take a beating but he doesn't actually know how much of it made planetfall or not.

Mind you, whether or not his enthusiasm is correct is immaterial. The point is that, by his standards as a member of the UEEF, a force of 6,000 soldiers is a huge display of military force. There's just no way that a force of 6,000 soldiers is considered so overwhelming unless the human population is only maybe a few hundred thousand in total. Even countries with less than a million people in total can muster more force than that without trying and we're talking about a setting where there is literally no alternative to military service if you're born in space.

There's just no way that there would be rival nations popping up when you could fit most of Earth's population into a single sports stadium. It's just... absurd. That's a part of why Harmony Gold killed the entire EBSIS concept stone dead.



ShadowLogan wrote:The EBSIS only exists in the 1E RPG's Canon, which does have non-SDF-1 survivors of the RoD that are scattered across the globe. Which means there could be divisions within that overall society that cause the formation of independent states, possibly even to super power level because it is clear the survivors represented varying political/cultural-ideologies.

Even then, it was just badly written and incredibly clichéd inclusion that was dated even at the time the book went to print.

The 1st Ed. RPG, of course, distorts the Robotech setting so heavily as to be effectively Robotech in name only... so... y'know, it doesn't mean much.



ShadowLogan wrote:Here's the question worth considering, what made that guy in TSC think there are "millions" of people still on the planet? While it might be easy to just quickly dismiss him as having no idea what's going on, the question is still worth considering.

Is it, though? He's never been to Earth before, and we've seen in the series that the UEEF is more or less clueless about the state of affairs on the planet.

The obvious explanation is that it's just clumsy dialog, either because the writers forgot how small the population was or thought "thousands of people" sounded really weird when you're talking about destroying an entire planet. In-universe, he's probably just a drama queen or he has a very strange notion of how many children people have been having. It's possible he's extrapolating from some very hokey population growth estimates that didn't correct for the Invid occupation's effect on society.
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Re: The EBSIS

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Seto wrote:Only if they're internally consistent. But even then, using a loaded term like "alternate universe" lends them an air of false legitimacy. It's easier, and more honest, to simply say "the McKinney novels", "the old RPG", or "works that Harmony Gold disowned due to poor quality"

I do not see it as a sense of "false legitimacy", these are legitimate Robotech products that HG approved of (even if it was in the rubber stamp phase). All you're doing from a practical standpoint is coming up with a long lengthy way of saying they are from another universe.

Seto wrote:Mind you, whether or not his enthusiasm is correct is immaterial. The point is that, by his standards as a member of the UEEF, a force of 6,000 soldiers is a huge display of military force. There's just no way that a force of 6,000 soldiers is considered so overwhelming unless the human population is only maybe a few hundred thousand in total. Even countries with less than a million people in total can muster more force than that without trying and we're talking about a setting where there is literally no alternative to military service if you're born in space.

Even if one takes the view that 6000 troops is a major sized formation, we know the UEEF has done it several times over 15years:
-10th MD
-21st MD
-Main Fleet (Ep83-5, though it is minus the SDF-3, and the SDF-4 that is part of it has a crew of over 6000 alone officially)
-Tokagawa officially has a crew of ~6500 people, and we know the UEEF staffed at least x2 (and SDF-1 which is of similar size has 2.6x more crew before we even consider civilians)

Scott's enthusiasm for a 6000 strong force that "can't lose" shows is that it is supposed to be sufficiently large enough, not that it represent a major chunk of the UEEF's available manpower.

Seto wrote:Is it, though? He's never been to Earth before, and we've seen in the series that the UEEF is more or less clueless about the state of affairs on the planet.

Yes it is. Just because he's never been to Earth doesn't mean he or even the UEEF can not have an idea of how many people are on the planet. Said figure could be based on the last known census of Earth (pre-2031), it could be based on reconnaissance/observation of the planet the UEEF has done recently (they are doing reconnaissance). Story-wisey both of these make much more sense than the guy being a drama queen or basing it on some outlandish population growth estimate.

From a production standpoint I agree someone either slipped up or this is evidence that w/n canon the statement in TRM saga is supposed to be taken to have some context that is not immediately apparent. In point of fact we as viewers know that the statement in question is not being completely truthful (Zentreadi contribution WAS being ignored, they did provide a massive labor pool).
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Re: The EBSIS

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ShadowLogan wrote:I do not see it as a sense of "false legitimacy", these are legitimate Robotech products that HG approved of [...]

They were at one time... but aren't anymore. That's kind of the whole point you've been studiously avoiding. Harmony Gold didn't sit down and decide these old materials were an alternate universe or broad strokes continuity. They sat down, looked at that mess, and said something very much like "Well ****, that ain't Robotech" and proceeded to publicly disown them.

Trying to falsely paint them as an AU or collection of AUs grossly misrepresents their actual status as disowned materials that Harmony Gold considers to be Robotech in name only. As in "literally not representative of the actual Robotech setting or content of the story".



ShadowLogan wrote:Even if one takes the view that 6000 troops is a major sized formation, we know the UEEF has done it several times over 15years:
-10th MD
-21st MD
-Main Fleet

With animation-accurate numbers, those 6,000 troops are something on the order of 1/3 of the UEEF's total strength in the 2040s.

That they've done it several times is immaterial... because the first two times were established to be major efforts to liberate humanity's homeworld, and in the third it was canonically (in the series) the ENTIRE REST OF THE UEEF coming back to knock heads and restore order.



ShadowLogan wrote:[...] (Ep83-5, though it is minus the SDF-3, and the SDF-4 that is part of it has a crew of over 6000 alone officially)
-Tokagawa officially has a crew of ~6500 people, and we know the UEEF staffed at least x2 (and SDF-1 which is of similar size has 2.6x more crew before we even consider civilians)

Remember, the point we're talking about here is that those massive crew numbers that form the foundation of arguments in defense of the argument that there were far more survivors than stated in the series are pure nonsense. They're fanon. And not even good fanon with a factual basis. They're garbage that flies in the face of what's actually in the show. Not by a small amount either, we're talking orders of magnitude.

Far from being a gargantuan ship, the "SDF-4" in the animation is only about 20% larger than a single ARMD-class space carrier. It's got a crew of a few hundred, not thousands. The same is broadly true for the Masters Saga ships.

As I've said in previous posts, the argument in defense of the higher population postwar topples like a house of cards once you remove the exaggerations it's predicated upon.



ShadowLogan wrote:Scott's enthusiasm for a 6000 strong force that "can't lose" shows is that it is supposed to be sufficiently large enough, not that it represent a major chunk of the UEEF's available manpower.

That's kind of not actually true, though... the 2nd ERF was a significant portion of the UEEF's forces. So much so that the only real option for a third was to recall the ENTIRE UEEF. This force that Scott is so excited to link up with, a hypothetical formation made up of surviving 1st and 2nd ERF units, is a MAJOR chunk of the UEEF's available military power.



ShadowLogan wrote:Yes it is. Just because he's never been to Earth doesn't mean he or even the UEEF can not have an idea of how many people are on the planet.

That's EXACTLY what it means, though. It wasn't possible to insert any intelligence operatives until shadow technology came along right near the end of the war, and even then many of them got slaughtered. There absolutely was not enough time to conduct a planetary census.
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Re: The EBSIS

Unread post by Peacebringer »

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


I dunno; can't say they didn't do the college-try, like the Robotech TV-series.

FASA was actually brilliant with some of their gaming systems, just some of their story-lines needed work. Renegade Legion is an awesome gaming system, better than Battletech, but, why, have those poor NPCs die for that story-line.
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Re: The EBSIS

Unread post by ShadowLogan »

Seto wrote:Trying to falsely paint them as an AU or collection of AUs grossly misrepresents their actual status as disowned materials that Harmony Gold considers to be Robotech in name only. As in "literally not representative of the actual Robotech setting or content of the story".

That still does not change the fact that from a practical standpoint, these are alternate universes even if they are disowned or considered in name only.

Seto wrote:With animation-accurate numbers, those 6,000 troops are something on the order of 1/3 of the UEEF's total strength in the 2040s.

That doesn't seem right. The SDF-3 alone per AotSC has 3800 troops and has no OSM to dispute it (if you want to go older than AotSC there is the 1E RPG but you'd be talking close to 14,000) is not factored in, nor does that assessment account for things like the Tokagawa the UEEF operates in this period (granted some survive and get reassigned), the staff at SSL/ALUCE/Tirol Base, Ghost Squadron (and those lost fighting them), ship types that get rectoned into operations not present in the OSM version (ex. the Shimikaze-class in Ep84-5 is part of the TSC depiction for the fleet). Then there is the possibility of other Point-K type bases on Earth (we know Point-L is in the Invasion videogame, which supports the idea there could have been Point A-J bases during the Invid Occupation).

Seto wrote:As I've said in previous posts, the argument in defense of the higher population postwar topples like a house of cards once you remove the exaggerations it's predicated upon.

The higher population doesn't topple like a house of cards. The only real support for a small population is a throw away line by Leonard in Ep37, one that is easily shown to be not entirely truthful even at that point.

While I agree HG needs to revise the infopedia several which ways from Sunday*, simply plugging in OSM numbers for the crew numbers doesn't always work. RT is not a 1:1 adaption of the OSM, we know they've changed things and added capabilities NOT present as part of the OSM-settings (based on various things: AE, artwork, dialogue, nature of the RT setting, etc).

*If you want to get overly technical even the RT.com timeline would fall under the heading of fanon, in the 90s you had the Early vs Late Return in terms of NG episode placement (in point of fact, AFAIK all licensed products pre-2000 used what amounts to a version of the ER timeline).

Seto wrote:That's EXACTLY what it means, though. It wasn't possible to insert any intelligence operatives until shadow technology came along right near the end of the war, and even then many of them got slaughtered. There absolutely was not enough time to conduct a planetary census.

I disagree, they had plenty of time to conduct a rudimentary census from orbit. They had "tactical recon flights" gathering data on Reflex Point (mentioned in TSC), which means those flights could also be used to assess other areas of the planet. Unless the UEEF is being extremely short sighted, those recon flights are probably also looking at other areas of the planet to get a proper assessment of maters on the ground.
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Re: The EBSIS

Unread post by Jefffar »

I think it's time to move the discussion of HG canon to the HG forums.

In the Palladium Robotech RPGs, the EBSIS was created for the 1st edition canon. It was not specifically mentioned by name, but the possibility for non-UEG aligned states does exist in the 2nd edition cannon.
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