Black Admiral wrote:and not a particularly good idea even leaving aside those considerations.
it's not? It's ineffective?
Think about it this way - if word gets out you're vivisecting POWs - and it almost certainly will - what are the other side going to do to any POWs they have? While I doubt the EAF's liable to start vivisecting ZAFT POWs in return, there's a lot of stuff between "doing nothing" and "retaliatory vivisections".
That's leaving aside, of course, the titanic PR disaster that would result from the whole affair becoming public knowledge.
Then there's the separate approaches to counter-insurgency operations; the EA, from what little information there is (and leaving aside the Phantom Pain for a moment) seem to restrict themselves to going after the people who're actually attacking them.
IIRC wasn't the Earth Alliance reaction to swatches of Eurasia seceding random shootings? Or arguably, was that ZAFT propaganda/bias as this is from ZAFT's perspective.
Well, I'm not about to argue that the EAF wasn't more than a little heavy-handed, but they seem to be fighting a full-blown civil war in the secessionist regions of Eurasia, and those are always nasty - were even in the days when matchlock muskets, pikes and muzzle-loading brass cannon were the pinnacle of military tech.
ZAFT, by contrast, during the desert campaigns of the First Bloody Valentine War, seems to have been dealing with a situation far closer to the one facing the US & allies in Iraq at the moment, although of considerably lesser intensity - and I don't see anybody seriously suggesting flattening entire towns to solve that.
Given those details (and probably more I'm forgetting), ZAFT's whining comes off as rather pathetic.
okay. I was referring to you saying ZAFT was killing off civilians, etc.
I certainly doubt that ZAFT's N Jammer barrage of Earth didn't inflict mass civilian deaths (almost certainly far more than the death toll at Junius Seven), and probably a lot more in the Eurasian Federation and Africa than in the Atlantic Federation.
"I do not say the French cannot come. I only say they cannot come by sea." - Admiral Lord St. Vincent, Royal Navy, during the Napoleonic Wars
"Show me a general who has made no mistakes and you speak of a general who has seldom waged war." - Marshal Turenne, 1641
Given that discussion has essentially come to a conclusion, I have decided that I will inflict my own ideas upon you all.
As is my style, it would be a new timeline. I have no ideas which are particularly good enough for something like UC, as such, I would contain myself to a distinct universe, if only because my notions are something of an acquired taste. As such, it is After Tranquility 1069*, and mankind has abandonned the Earth is a great diaspora across the system. Over a period of centuries, the cradle of humanity has become increasingly neglected, and neither the Orbitarians or Lunarians are particularly interested in it beyond what is left of its mineral wealth. Some time ago, both Mars and Venus were implausibly colonised, with glittering belts of O'neill Cylinders and Standford Torii encircling them. Martian and Venusian influence extends to the Asteroid Belt, from which most of their mineral wealth is drawn. The Martians also control Mercury, which is the antimatter capital of the solar system!
Younger than these two are the nations surrounding Jupiter and Saturn. Though they are developed, and again implausibly well colonised (I like Cowboy Bebop), they are still young. However, they possess most of the precious Helium 3, upon which high-energy civillisations are built! This makes them filthy sticking rich, and as such it is inevitable that the inner system will end up being less important in the long run than the outer system nations, which is basically what happened to the Lunarians. Currently, both Mars and Venus have larger populations and are far more practised at making the uninhabitable habitable, but it won't last. I have no doubt that Uranus and Neptune are the new frontier from which great swathes of wealth shall be extracted. Beyond that, there isn't much - though in the Kuiper Belt, evil lurks.
The last big war, which was some centuries ago, was fought with self-replicating drone swarms. Upon realising how bad an idea this is, everyone involved banned the usage of such weapons, prematurely ending the war. For whatever reason, some got away and do their thing in the Kuiper Belt. Perhaps the expense is too great, but keeping an eye on the drones is considered more cost-efficent than wiping them all out; the ability exists to more or less keep them in the Kuiper Belt, with rare exceptions, to provide spice to the lives of Neptunians.
This is, after a fashion, the setting. It's not very fleshed out, but I've only given this cursory thought. I've given more thought to characters, but not by much. As a general rule, the protagonist of a Gundam series tends to from the 'ordinary high school student pilots giant robot' category. While there's nothing really wrong with this, I'm here to be needlessly unconventional. As such, we have FREEMAN AYATO+, who is an implausibly young black marketeer who organises the transportation of pretty much anything (drugs, weapons, cloned human organs, parabolic mirrors and what have you) from basically anywhere to basically anywhere else. With his lolilicious Lunarian secretary, he is one of the go-to-guys in Mars orbit when you want to get twenty million pirated copies of Giant Robots Gone Wild from the surface all the way out to Titan at a very competitive price. Because of his 'heritage', he carries around a 'ceremonial nodachi, an heirloom of my family' which is fact a high tech sonic bladed weapon, just in case things go awry and he is required to cut something in half. Despite this, he cannot hold himself in a fight, and certainly cannot pilot a mobile suit.
We first meet our glorious hero after a private party with his assistant involving a variety of bonuses from his most recent employer Dmitri for such an excellent job of shipping an extremely large quantity of cocaine into the Cylinder. Suffering from a massive hangover, he goes about his business as usual, and gets contacted for another smuggling job, this time for real human organs in dead bodies from some minor Martian conflict. Because of the aforementioned massive hangover, Ayato doesn't pay much attention to the details, or how cagey Dmitri is being about the whole thing. So he organises with a group of mercenaries who are making the corpses to pick them up from Dmitri's man on the ground and bring them to whatever-the-hell Ayato's Cylinder is called.
The twist is that the corpses are still alive, and are probably not for organ transplants. Ayato has enough of a functioning guilt chip that he won't do slavery, and so promptly tells the mercs that they aren't getting paid, and he promptly tells Dmitri that he isn't getting his merchandise. After telling them to fuck off and die, he sends the frozen people to some charity and then goes to prepare for his inevitable murder. Dmitri shows up with a couple of gorillas (they may be actual gorillas) to break Ayato's legs, and as he tries to distract them so his assistant can get away, a disgruntled mercenary shows up. Her name is Artemis Kafka, and she is the baseball bat toting pilot of the Gundam of this story, and one of the top pilots in the Invictus Military Company. She was probably going to break something of Ayato's as well, but his speech to the gangsters touches her enough that she breaks Dmitri's face instead.
Shortly afterwards, events conspire to drop Ayato and friend aboard the Invictus (which is the resident Cool Ship), and he scores a job as 'logistics officer'. There are some other ideas, but they're a lot more vague.
*Kudos to Zor, who is the first person I've seen who uses an 'After Tranquility' calender.
Here's a fan made Crossbone OP. I swear everyone looks like a kid. Even the old guy. And I have to say this thread is edging me towards actually diving into Gundam Sentinel. It would probably shed some light about the MS mechanics that were discussed.
And I have to say this thread is edging me towards actually diving into Gundam Sentinel. It would probably shed some light about the MS mechanics that were discussed.
I wouldn't mind looking into Gundam Sentinel myself, though I have a feeling that would be quite impossible unless there are translations available.
Personally, I'd be interested in reading Beltorchika's Children as well. If only because it features the Sazabi Nightingale and Hi-nu Gundam, which are amazingly more hax than the Sazabi and nu already were.
I'm more interested in Magical Ensign Blaster Mari myself. Or that Gundam vs. Gigantis manga where the Ideon is recovered by the Zeons and it turns out Judau is the reincarnation of Cosmo Yuki. That's some high quality shit right there.
Sentinel, Beltochika's children (Wait, you mean not all those random people we saw die bit it?? And we get nifty new MS too?), and especially MEBM are the few obscure portions of the Gundam Franchise I want to get my hands on. That, and yet more of the old SD Gundam one shots and such (the new series not so much, though it did have a certain charm, despite being aimed at an even younger audience than usual).
However, Beltorchika's Children is probably one of those more obscure pieces of the franchise which would be difficult to find. Lord knows that whatever VF is looking for probably doesn't even exist in print any more.
Black Admiral wrote:
Think about it this way - if word gets out you're vivisecting POWs - and it almost certainly will - what are the other side going to do to any POWs they have? While I doubt the EAF's liable to start vivisecting ZAFT POWs in return, there's a lot of stuff between "doing nothing" and "retaliatory vivisections".
you're right. Then again it would depend on which Earth Alliance member captured them-the Eurasians are more likely to not be as bad as say the Atlantic Federation
Well, I'm not about to argue that the EAF wasn't more than a little heavy-handed, but they seem to be fighting a full-blown civil war in the secessionist regions of Eurasia, and those are always nasty - were even in the days when matchlock muskets, pikes and muzzle-loading brass cannon were the pinnacle of military tech.
Yes that is true. I wonder what provoked the people to secede from the Earth Alliance. They simply say that they're tired of being drafted and placed in camps, or detained and taken their rights away-depending on if it's a fansub or dub, etc...possibly the secessionist regions were disproportionately affected by the war...it is interesting that the parts of Eurasia that seceded were close to ZAFT bases and controlled territory from the first war..
I certainly doubt that ZAFT's N Jammer barrage of Earth didn't inflict mass civilian deaths (almost certainly far more than the death toll at Junius Seven), and probably a lot more in the Eurasian Federation and Africa than in the Atlantic Federation.
More in Eurasia than the Atlantic? Hmm. I do know the official Gundam site says that that 10 million people died.
Ford Prefect wrote:However, Beltorchika's Children is probably one of those more obscure pieces of the franchise which would be difficult to find. Lord knows that whatever VF is looking for probably doesn't even exist in print any more.
Yes, but we can always hope that some kind soul has transcribed or digitized the text for us. I'd even be willing to help with translation in such a case.
But yeah, barring that, the closest we're getting to Beltochika's children is the Gundam evolve sequence which follows the BC version of Quess and Hathaway's battle instead of the CCA version.
Ryushikaze wrote:But yeah, barring that, the closest we're getting to Beltochika's children is the Gundam evolve sequence which follows the BC version of Quess and Hathaway's battle instead of the CCA version.
Is that the one where space is red for some reason?
I always liked that one. While it was another installment of Tomino's softy campaign of revisiting the darker points in UC and making them "happier", I I thought it ended up being a welll-executed alternative scenario.
I believe in a sign of Zeta.
[BOTM|WG|JL|Mecha Maniacs|Pax Cybertronia|Veteran of the Psychic Wars|Eva Expert]
"And besides, who cares if a monster destroys Australia?"
Ryushikaze wrote:But yeah, barring that, the closest we're getting to Beltochika's children is the Gundam evolve sequence which follows the BC version of Quess and Hathaway's battle instead of the CCA version.
Is that the one where space is red for some reason?
I always liked that one. While it was another installment of Tomino's softy campaign of revisiting the darker points in UC and making them "happier", I I thought it ended up being a welll-executed alternative scenario.
Agreed, especially since it actually made since compared to the kill just for killing's sake that seemed to be going on in CCA.
That's probably the best of the Gundam Evolve shorts, in my opinion. Apart from it just generally being nice (aww, a happy ending for a change. CCA is good but it's still the Be Invoked of Gundam) it's got a lot of artistry. Space is red, emotions are colourful, the nu Gundam looks great and so on. Amuro is the Jesus that Kira wants to be.
