20 replies to this topic

[Alan Davion]

Brenden, on 06 January 2017 - 04:59 PM, said:

Huh.
Maybe I should give Macross a look, it stopped airing long before my time and the only thing I got to watch regarding robots was Cyborg 009, Gundam Wing/00 and Zoids. God I loved Zoids. We need more Quad mechs.

But in all, if they're more-or-less at the same technological level, wouldn't the Battletech Universe still edge them out in terms of Numerical Superiority alone? There must be BILLIONS of people across the Inner Sphere, maybe even Trillions - and who knows HOW many Battlemechs. I'm guessing around two or three million.

I saw Robotech via re-runs in the mid-90s. I didn't see the actual, original Macross anime until just a few years ago. I would certainly recommend watching Macross, whether via a streaming site or if you torrent it, one way or the other, get it.

That said, the Zentradi also hugely outnumbered the Earth forces. During the final episodes their entire fleet numbered somewhere over a million ships, that's got to be somewhere close to or over a billion fifty-foot tall soldiers.

I don't know what the population level of the Inner Sphere is, given that some worlds probably didn't have more than a few hundred thousand inhabitants, while others somehow had over ten million people held in very small areas.

But, for the sake of argument, I do know the IS had about 2000 inhabited planets, so let's just say off-hand an average population of 10 million a planet, that comes out to 20,000,000,000, which is probably somewhere on the high side of things.

As far as mechs go, for houses like Davion, Kurita and Steiner it might be possible they have standing armies of somewhere upwards of a million mechs. Marik and Liao would probably be lucky to muster half that number given the size of their realms.

Bombast, on 06 January 2017 - 05:00 PM, said:

I don't know about that - As I recall, the only reason they didn't steam roll Earth is because they didn't know what in the hell was going on. For at least the first half of the original Macross series, the Zentradi refuse to push their advantage because they simply don't believe they have one.

In addition, the SDF-1 (And Earth) is run by imbeciles that don't understand the ship they're flying, and every misstep is so catastrophically dumb that the Zentradi assume it must be some sort of trap, or the 'Micronians' know something they don't.

Part of what I said about the Zentradi war technology being in disrepair comes from the old Robotech novels that got a little more in-depth into the background than the cartoon series was capable of doing.

The cartoon touched on this a little bit after the SDF-1 destroyed Dolza's space fortress, and shortly thereafter captured the Robotech Factory Space Station, but as I said, the novels got more in depth on those particular events than the cartoon was capable of.

As far as both sides being rather ignorant in one way shape or form, yes there is that. The Zentradi, in the Robotech version, were used to fighting the Invid, where both sides just kind of charged each other all at once and whoever had more numbers won.

They weren't used to fighting the Humans who used completely unorthodox tactics that they hadn't dreamed about, weren't capable of dreaming about even. The battle at the Mars Sara base for example. Khyron and however many battlepods under his command simply charged at the base and the SDF-1 which lied just beyond the base. The SDF-1 forces fought a withdrawing battle while Lisa Hayes set the base reactor to overload and when it blew, easily 90% of the forces Khyron had with him were simply incinerated.