No Love for Southern Cross?

[Seto Kaiba]

2 hours ago, GabrielV said:

But I recall when watching the section initially wondering if Leonard was a traitor or an idiot.

The Robotech adaptation of Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross made most of the characters a good deal less awful... but Claude Leon/Eli Leonard was the exception.  They took him from being a hawkish, stubborn, inflexible general who could be unreasonable at times to a rabid xenophobe on steroids who thought suicide missions were an appropriate response to dissent among his advisers and would hurl his troops into unwinnable fights and berate them for not winning later.

Either way, he was bad enough at his job that he was absolutely an asset to the Zor Lords/Robotech Masters.

 

3 hours ago, GabrielV said:

I used to run Robotech RPGs regularly.  Anecdotally, one of the things I always found odd when recruiting pickup players was how none of them ever wanted to be veritech flyboys like Rick, Max, or Scott.  Pickup players usually wanted to be veritech hover tank pilots with a tiny few wanting to be cyclone specialists.

On 1st Ed., I take it?  

2nd Ed. made the Masters Saga a fairly unpopular prospect since the character generation was a big mess in that sourcebook and the mecha were pretty terrible as dictated by canon.

[GabrielV]

21 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

1st Ed., I take it?  

2nd Ed. made the Masters Saga a fairly unpopular prospect since the character generation was a big mess in that sourcebook and the mecha were pretty terrible as dictated by canon.

Yep.  1st edition.

Years ago I picked up 2e/Shadow Chronicles (Invid Invasion x1.5).  I dumped it because Siembieda seemed to have zeroed in on any element that made the game feel emulative of the show and ripped those parts out while exacerbating every other problem the 1st edition had.

I picked up the 2e stuff when they were on clearance.  I feel dirty for it, but I did it.  I did get the Southern Cross book but I haven't looked at it.

Even in the old game the Southern Cross mecha kinda sucked.  The reason was simple: lack of large missile payloads or lack of missile payloads of any kind.  The 1e versions have decent gun pods, but other than the AGACs (which carries MRMs, IIRC) they don't have any real alpha strike crunch power.  This is not good when the Bioroids have some pretty beefy MDC.   Just about any Robotech mecha other than Cyclones are superior in dealing with the Masters' forces than the Southern Cross machines are.

Ironically, the 1e Southern Cross mecha are awesome against Invid.  They are perfectly set up for eye shots as well as operating for extended periods without needing reloads.

 

[Seto Kaiba]

9 minutes ago, GabrielV said:

Years ago I picked up 2e/Shadow Chronicles (Invid Invasion x1.5).  I dumped it because Siembieda seemed to have zeroed in on any element that made the game feel emulative of the show and ripped those parts out while exacerbating every other problem the 1st edition had.

Odd that you would put it like that, considering the biggest talking point in the Robotech RPG's 2nd Edition was that Harmony Gold insisted that it would be required to comply closely with Robotech's official canon and wrote a fair amount of editorial power for themselves into Palladium's license for the purpose of ensuring it.  It ended up a bit of a troubled production after a while though, due to changes in writers stranding at least one book in limbo and basically running out of material after four books.¹

I've reviewed most of the books and found 2nd Edition to be an enormous improvement, accuracy-wise, over the previous edition where Kevin Siembieda was swinging blind and throwing in any old thing that crossed his mind to pad out his page counts.

'course that didn't really please the Southern Cross fans any.  The Masters Saga book spent a lot of unnecessary pages on separate OCCs and MOSs for every individual specialist squad the Southern Cross Army had... including all of the ones that never made it into the Southern Cross anime.  That stuff about Leonard being an incompetent military dictator is in there, as well as a bunch of other stuff that breaks a lot of commonly accepted fanon.

 

50 minutes ago, GabrielV said:

Even in the old game the Southern Cross mecha kinda sucked.  The reason was simple: lack of large missile payloads or lack of missile payloads of any kind.  The 1e versions have decent gun pods, but other than the AGACs (which carries MRMs, IIRC) they don't have any real alpha strike crunch power.  This is not good when the Bioroids have some pretty beefy MDC.   Just about any Robotech mecha other than Cyclones are superior in dealing with the Masters' forces than the Southern Cross machines are.

They suck worse in 2E, due to Palladium's writers having to give them accurate-to-canon stats and the canon generally echoing OSM remarks about how badly designed and ineffective those mecha were.²  Now they're more like glass cannons, though at least the Bioroids got the same treatment that almost puts them in the territory in the anime where Jeanne took one down with an infantry-issue laser rifle.  Their only real virtues are that they're invisible to the Invid and that their onboard fusion reactors last decently long between refuelings.

It caused a fair amount of grousing when the book first came out, as the Macross Saga sourcebook that immediately preceded it made the Masters Saga mecha look even worse by comparison.  The VF-1 had to be NERFed³ in order to keep it from being an out-and-out game breaker, and even in the aftermath of the NERFing it's still overpowered enough for it to be a serious competitor to the massively buffed Alpha.⁴

 

1. They still dragged it out for two more, but after the New Generation sourcebook they were basically out of material.  The Genesis Pits book was little more than a glorified B-movie monster generator and the UEEF Marines book was an attempt to monetize the Imai Files as Robotech 1.5: In Vague Proximity to, but not actually, the Sentinels.  Their license was revoked over the tabletop Kickstarter funding scandal before they could put out anything else, though reportedly they had at least two more books in development.

2. The TASC-01-SCF Logan in particular is abused by almost every Southern Cross publication, all of which seem to take pains to note how utterly ineffective it was against the Zor and how the TASC-02-SCF Auroran was a "too little too late" fix for the problem.  Marie Angel's was apparently the exception to the rule.

3. The VF-1 Valkyrie's UUM-7 micro-missile pods from Macross: Do You Remember Love? were accidentally included because Palladium's research copied from Macross fansites that typically don't differentiate between the TV and DYRL? VF-1.  They NERFed the SRMs in those pods down to a unguided mini-missile to avoid the VF-1 automatically outclassing EVERYTHING in the game, even though the same model of missile is a SRM in other launchers statted in the game. 

4. Even after the NERFing it's still the fastest, most agile fighter out there on top of being invisible to the Invid, having autododge, getting a late service life upgrade that puts its armor up there with the Alpha's, having an autotargeting gun option, having multiple option packs with more weapons and armor, and being the only fighter with long-range missile capability.

[GabrielV]

Hopefully I'm not derailing.  I just feel the urge to talk about the RPG.

I skimmed the Southern Cross 2e book last night.  The core mecha (VHT, Logan, and AGACs) seemed to follow the same format that the Alpha did in the 2e corebook.  The MDC was multiplied roughly by 1.5 and the damage of non-missile weapons remained flat.  Actually, a few things got minor bumps up.  The Logan and AGACs even got auto-dodge which the Alpha didn't.  I dunno, first blush is that the 2e Logan and AGACs are slightly better than before.

The VHT is slightly worse.  Since 2e drops multiple dodge and makes each dodge against each attack cost a full action and drops phased combat anything that is outnumbered is at a crippling disadvantage that didn't exist in 1e.  However, it at least still has it's arm shields for parry.  They've been mildly downgraded to 500 MDC instead of 600, but the arm shields were ridiculously overstatted before anyway.

I didn't really look at the Battloids.  They never popped up in my old games, so I have no familiarity with the old versions.

Not really a fan of how they've done Mecha Combat since the end of 1e.  I liked the classic style like+2 attacks at first and another +1 usually at 6th and 11th level.  I dislike the Macross II and later style of a constant drip of extra attacks while leveling up with flat strike/parry/dodge bonuses.  Personally, I always thought they should have gone with a slow attack per round progression and put the drip feed of bonuses on strike/parry/dodge.

 

[Seto Kaiba]

49 minutes ago, GabrielV said:

Hopefully I'm not derailing.  I just feel the urge to talk about the RPG.

As long as it's relevant to Southern Cross it should be OK... and the Masters Saga sourcebook most definitely is.

 

51 minutes ago, GabrielV said:

The MDC was multiplied roughly by 1.5 and the damage of non-missile weapons remained flat.

A lot of stuff in the game's 2nd Edition got bumps to compensate for stat creep in Palladium Books's "Megaverse" games... the fairness and evenhandedness of which can be politely described as "heavily disputed".  Admittedly there was also no small amount of grumbling over how Harmony Gold shot a number of fan theories down, most notably the notions that the TAF's Sylphid fighter was a variable fighter or that it had three distinct variants with different wing designs.  (It just suffered from a lot of spotty, off-model animation in the Southern Cross series.)

 

53 minutes ago, GabrielV said:

Actually, a few things got minor bumps up.  The Logan and AGACs even got auto-dodge which the Alpha didn't.  I dunno, first blush is that the 2e Logan and AGACs are slightly better than before.

General consensus among the hardcore players was that the bumps the Southern Cross Army mecha got were rather less effective than those received by other mecha, making them less effective overall.

 

58 minutes ago, GabrielV said:

I didn't really look at the Battloids.  They never popped up in my old games, so I have no familiarity with the old versions.

Most people basically ignore them... and that includes the creators of Southern Cross. 

Officially, only one of them has a name and none of them ever received any kind of stats from the Ammonite design team that created them.  Almost everything in the book for them is pure fanon.  They were allegedly supposed to be more prominent in the show's third cour, but it ended up on the network's chopping block shortly after the end of the first cour so they never got there.

[Protoculture]

Of all the 1st Ed. and 2nd Ed. run of Robotech RPG by Palladium, I found my 2nd Edition Robotech Master book is the one I treasured most. All because of the inclusion of all pre-production arts of SC Battloids and even pre-production Bioroids that never appeared in the animation itself. I  don't play the RPG, I collect 'em basically to enrich my Robotech-verse that severely lacking in source materials, apart from the 4 Art of Robotech books (Art of RT 1-3 and Art of RT: SC).

OTOH, I had to admit, I am one of those fringe SC fans that Seto talked about. I won't say bad on that small fan community stuck in the somewhat more numerous overwhelming Macross part of Robotech fandom, but I understand from business POV, yes the SC segment of Robotech won't make much money. We can even see this how SC characters get secondary role and relegated to cameos in Robotech: Love & War and Robotech: Prelude to Shadow Chronicles comic series. The same also can be said in the animated Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles and Robotech: Love Live Alive ... except for Louie Nichols who is major character in RTSC.

The only time we've some SC love is only Robotech II: Sentinels the Movie and the now disavowed Robotech The Untold Story.

[JetJockey]

On 8/22/2018 at 10:59 AM, GabrielV said:

Honestly, it's been ages since I watched the Southern Cross section of Robotech.  I don't enjoy that part, and don't like any of the characters.  When I first watched it in the 80s, I think I liked Louie and Musica, but that was about it.  I rewatched the section years ago when the series was released on DVD, but I've skipped it ever since.

I think I liked both Southern Cross and New Generation more than Macross because of the more adventure aspects of the series. They are always riding around on bikes or exploring stuff. Even though all three are about war, the other two series seemed I guess lighter for me back then compared to Macross. And also less mushy with the love stories. But I still thought the valkyrie was the best transforming vehicle in the series. After that the Cyclone and Hovertank are probably tied. Both toys gave me problems and I never got what I wanted. Which was a good version of Rook's bike and a Hovertank mode toy.

[Tober]

Does anyone know where I might find higher res pics of these Bioroid isometrics, or the source they came from? 

 

[JetJockey]

They should be in the This is Animation book. I have that somewhere around here.

[Tober]

11 minutes ago, JetJockey said:

They should be in the This is Animation book. I have that somewhere around here.

Are you able to upload high res scans of all of the Bioroids? Otherwise is that magazine easily found anymore?

[JetJockey]

I paged through the book and the front images of the bioroids are in the book but not the smaller side and back detail drawings. I guess those are in a book I don't have. Or maybe the Robotech Art 1 book. I don't know many Japanese Southern Cross artbooks. Only the This is Animation one. They have a few on ebay.

[Tober]

1 hour ago, JetJockey said:

I paged through the book and the front images of the bioroids are in the book but not the smaller side and back detail drawings. I guess those are in a book I don't have. Or maybe the Robotech Art 1 book. I don't know many Japanese Southern Cross artbooks. Only the This is Animation one. They have a few on ebay.

Okay, thanks. I have the Robotech Art books and they aren't in there or the Palladium RPG books.

The hunt continues... 

[JetJockey]

1 hour ago, Tober said:

Okay, thanks. I have the Robotech Art books and they aren't in there or the Palladium RPG books.

The hunt continues... 

I forgot about those RPG books. I think I have one or two of those. Post if you find more books. I know I'm going to get the first record for the interior artwork. But I don't think those drawings are in there either.

[Seto Kaiba]

20 hours ago, Tober said:

Does anyone know where I might find higher res pics of these Bioroid isometrics, or the source they came from? 

 

It's hard to say for certain since those images are so small, but from the layout they appear to be Imai's blueprint sketches from when Imai was trying to develop a line of Southern Cross kits at (initially) 1/32 scale (later 1/40 and 1/48).  The "Imai Files" contained drafts in that same format for the Spartas.

As such, it's probably part of that allegedly vast collection of Southern Cross art that went unpublished because the series was canceled and HG gives zero f*cks.  (Whether said huge art stockpile actually exists is unconfirmed.)

 

20 hours ago, JetJockey said:

They should be in the This is Animation book. I have that somewhere around here.

Oh my, no.  There is very little mechanical design art in This is Animation 10: Southern Cross... and nothing like as detailed or presentable as that.

 

10 hours ago, JetJockey said:

I paged through the book and the front images of the bioroids are in the book but not the smaller side and back detail drawings. I guess those are in a book I don't have. Or maybe the Robotech Art 1 book. I don't know many Japanese Southern Cross artbooks. Only the This is Animation one. They have a few on ebay.

AFAIK, This is Animation 10 is the only true Southern Cross artbook.  There were various magazine articles and color inserts around the time the show debuted, but none of them I've seen have anything like that.  It's usually just the same handful of standard views of the mecha.

[Tober]

6 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

It's hard to say for certain since those images are so small, but from the layout they appear to be Imai's blueprint sketches from when Imai was trying to develop a line of Southern Cross kits at (initially) 1/32 scale (later 1/40 and 1/48).  The "Imai Files" contained drafts in that same format for the Spartas.

As such, it's probably part of that allegedly vast collection of Southern Cross art that went unpublished because the series was canceled and HG gives zero f*cks.  (Whether said huge art stockpile actually exists is unconfirmed.)

Thanks Seto Kaiba!  But someone out there must have those images... 

[Seto Kaiba]

18 hours ago, Tober said:

Thanks Seto Kaiba!  But someone out there must have those images... 

Well, if certain individuals are to be believed, there's a great big box of Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross line art just collecting dust somewhere in Harmony Gold USA's office in Los Angeles.

Southern Cross's premature conclusion due to its poor ratings performance meant that Tatsunoko didn't get a chance to put out much in the way of official publications.  I, for one, am not convinced there's much in the way of unpublished line art for Southern Cross given that we know the show's troubled development meant that the series concept didn't achieve its final form until right before the start of production.  There wouldn't have been time to come up with super-detailed animation model sheets when they were almost literally making it up as they went... which probably explains the many instances of off-model animation in background designs like the TAF Sylphid.

Whatever art from Ammonite, Tatsunoko, or Imai that Harmony Gold is sitting on will probably be used in the next Robotech art book published by Udon... assuming that Udon will be doing another after the Macross book they just did.  Even if it's only up to the same lackluster standard as that Macross book, it'll stand head and shoulders above every other Southern Cross publication for completeness.

[JetJockey]

On 9/9/2018 at 2:16 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

Well, if certain individuals are to be believed, there's a great big box of Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross line art just collecting dust somewhere in Harmony Gold USA's office in Los Angeles.

Southern Cross's premature conclusion due to its poor ratings performance meant that Tatsunoko didn't get a chance to put out much in the way of official publications.  I, for one, am not convinced there's much in the way of unpublished line art for Southern Cross given that we know the show's troubled development meant that the series concept didn't achieve its final form until right before the start of production.  There wouldn't have been time to come up with super-detailed animation model sheets when they were almost literally making it up as they went... which probably explains the many instances of off-model animation in background designs like the TAF Sylphid.

Whatever art from Ammonite, Tatsunoko, or Imai that Harmony Gold is sitting on will probably be used in the next Robotech art book published by Udon... assuming that Udon will be doing another after the Macross book they just did.  Even if it's only up to the same lackluster standard as that Macross book, it'll stand head and shoulders above every other Southern Cross publication for completeness.

Do you know anything about the cels and sketches that might have escaped the studio? I haven't seen many good ones.

[Seto Kaiba]

6 hours ago, JetJockey said:

Do you know anything about the cels and sketches that might have escaped the studio? I haven't seen many good ones.

Only what was preserved by Imai, one of Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross's merchandising partners, and was later made available in the so-called "Imai Files" that were published by Roger Harkavy.  That was mainly material from the Genesis Climber MOSPEADA series development though... the Southern Cross-related material therein was primarily from Tatsunoko's 2nd series concept: Science Fiction Sengoku Saga.  The intermediate phase of development between the original, lolicon fanservice-heavy pitch for a slice of life series starring historical domain characters like Joan of Arc and Cleopatra, and the final, heavily Gundam- and Macross-influenced concept that made it to production as Southern Cross.

It's mainly concept art of the Arming Doublet from when the story was "Sengoku period warfare IN SPAAAAACE!", so you'll see a fair bit of stuff like robotic horses and falcons, infantrymen with lances and the banners of famous clans like the Takeda and the Tokugawa.  (Offhand I don't recall if they used the infamous and historically inaccurate Fuurin Kazan banner for Takeda, but their clan symbol and Tokugawa's are present on the art.)  The only things that were really relevant to the final Southern Cross concept were the model kit blueprints and the concept for a transforming flying castle that became the Zor cityships.

[JetJockey]

These Imai Files had pictures of the actual cels? I'll look that up.

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, JetJockey said:

These Imai Files had pictures of the actual cels? I'll look that up.

Not pictures of cels, just reasonable quality scans of concept art.

I'd be surprised if cels from Southern Cross made it into circulation... the impression I got from the creator commentary was that the series just sort of unceremoniously ended and the staff and studio immediately moved on to other projects to recoup the loss.

[tekering]

13 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

I'd be surprised if cels from Southern Cross made it into circulation...

This one just sold on Yahoo! Japan Auctions back in June:

[JetJockey]

That looks like a pretty good cel. I need to check more often.

[JetJockey]

I saw these in the recent Macross convention topic.

 

 

[Podtastic]

 

https://twitter.com/hashtag/%E8%B6%85%E6%99%82%E7%A9%BA%E7%A5%AD%E3%82%8A?src=hash

 This looks like a really cool Red Bioroid.  Anyone know what it is?

[Convectuoso]

1 hour ago, Podtastic said:

 

https://twitter.com/hashtag/%E8%B6%85%E6%99%82%E7%A9%BA%E7%A5%AD%E3%82%8A?src=hash

 This looks like a really cool Red Bioroid.  Anyone know what it is?

I couldn't see it

[tekering]

Looks like a fixed-pose resin kit to me.

It's not bad...

...but Captain America could do much better.  

[Tober]

That is beautiful! 

The head is a bit strange though. As if it's looking down. It should be in a fixed position. 

Edited November 1, 2018 by Tober

[Podtastic]

51 minutes ago, tekering said:

Looks like a fixed-pose resin kit to me.

It's not bad...

...but Captain America could do much better.  

Well if he's interested prehaps we can put that to the test at some point.

[captain america]

3 hours ago, Podtastic said:

 

https://twitter.com/hashtag/%E8%B6%85%E6%99%82%E7%A9%BA%E7%A5%AD%E3%82%8A?src=hash

 This looks like a really cool Red Bioroid.  Anyone know what it is?

Looks like a highly modified plastic kit.

[Seto Kaiba]

3 hours ago, Podtastic said:

 

https://twitter.com/hashtag/%E8%B6%85%E6%99%82%E7%A9%BA%E7%A5%AD%E3%82%8A?src=hash

 This looks like a really cool Red Bioroid.  Anyone know what it is?

IIRC, the only Southern Cross Bioroid kit was Imai's 1/48 scale... and that looks too big to be one.

The unevenness of some of the lines on the hands and knees makes me suspect either a bootleg kit or something someone scratch-built.

[Convectuoso]

4 hours ago, Podtastic said:

Well if he's interested prehaps we can put that to the test at some point.

We'd love to see the Captain create some models from Southern Cross, but there doesn't seem to be enough interest. 

[Tober]

6 hours ago, Convectuoso said:

We'd love to see the Captain create some models from Southern Cross, but there doesn't seem to be enough interest. 

Capt is working on a dropship from Southern Cross currently. So there is interest (and capital) from somewhere...

[JetJockey]

Did the Robotech forums reopen? Or they can't talk about that sort of thing over there. I remember there was a big blow up about something in those forums years ago. I think it was around the time of the Beagle Cyclones. I think the usual bad behavior was happening. People getting banned, posts erased, people couldn't bring up certain topics.

[jenius]

You can't discuss unlicensed goods on robotech.com since it's hosted by the license holder.

[Seto Kaiba]

6 hours ago, JetJockey said:

Did the Robotech forums reopen? Or they can't talk about that sort of thing over there.

They did reopen, but they're still very much the borderline ghost town they were before the old site went down.

 

6 hours ago, JetJockey said:

I remember there was a big blow up about something in those forums years ago. I think it was around the time of the Beagle Cyclones. I think the usual bad behavior was happening. People getting banned, posts erased, people couldn't bring up certain topics.

Yeah, back in '07-'08 there was a back to back pair of big dustups where the volunteer moderators went on banning sprees which ended up largely depopulated the site.  What started it was the fandom's overwhelmingly negative response to the Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles "movie".  The ensuing deluge of criticism prompted the volunteer mods there to assert that non-constructive criticism was tantamount to a personal attack on the movie's staff and start handing out bans, and since "constructive criticism" was more a code word for "effusive praise" the bans flowed like water.  

It got worse after fans started asking pointed questions about the Macross legal situation when HG announced that the proposed live action movie was going to be a reimagined "Macross Saga".  The volunteer mods dispensed a huge amount of inaccurate and generally malicious misinformation and then banned anyone who corrected them, claiming the corrections had caused them "pain and suffering".

The forum's rules were usually OK with legit Japanese non-HG-licensed merch being talked about, but grey market stuff like Cap's models would have been right out.