sirkermittsg wrote:I am aware that Macross II is related to the original Macross so it would not include the Southern Cross and Invid Invasion stuff.....it also has some 1000 ships fron Britai's fleet allying themselves with the humans.
Eh... before we delve too deeply into this, it's probably better if I start by letting you know
virtually everything that was presented in Palladium's
Macross II RPG is incorrect. Somehow... some way... they got almost every detail of the series wrong, right down to the year it's set in. Exactly how it happened, I can't tell you (because Palladium has NEVER responded to any inquiry we've sent them about it), but pretty much every detail regarding the OVA's setting, its backstory, its timeline, its characters, its mecha, etc. is all incorrect.
sirkermittsg wrote:I also aware that it occurs many years in the future of Macross...like 50 or so years.
Officially, the events of the
Macross II: Lovers Again OVA occur in a "parallel world" continuity that treats
Macross: Do You Remember Love? as the "true" version of the first space war, and depicts events that occur in 2091 and 2092 in that timeline... roughly 80 years after the end of the first space war.
sirkermittsg wrote:other then that what are the differences between Macross II and Robotech?
Whoa... now THAT is an example of "short question, LONG answer".
Okay, where to start?
Backstory! There are, as you know, no Robotech Masters, no Invid, none of that Haydonite nonsense... no "flowers of life" and Protoculture is an ancient civilization. To make a long story short:
Around half a million years BCE, the galaxy's first sentient species, known now as the Protoculture, emerged and developed the first interstellar civilization. They used their advanced genetic science to improve themselves, to terraform worlds, and so on, creating designer "sub-Protoculture" species to do the actual legwork in preparing new worlds to be colonized. They advanced their science to the point that they no longer needed to reproduce normally, using cloning technology that made love and so on completely unnecessary. This led to the separation of the genders in society, and eventually resulted in an honest-to-goodness civil war along gender lines... a war fought by proxy using giant, genetically engineered soldiers based on the male and female Protoculture genome called the Zentradi (men) and Meltrandi (women). The war got so thoroughly out of hand that it resulted in mutually-assured destruction of both sides, causing the Protoculture to lose control of their soldiers and forcing the survivors to flee into the galactic wilderness.
One such group settled on Earth and tried to start over with men and women in coexistence, re-engineering the local fauna into a sub-Protoculture species (humanity) that would do the hard work of building a complex society for them. They were able to build a fairly sophisticated city and start to reestablish their society before being forced to flee again when the war between the Zentradi and Meltrandi got uncomfortably close to the Sol system, burying their city and leaving their primitive human creations to fend for themselves.
Flash forward a few tens of thousands of years, and in the year 1999 a badly damaged Meltrandi gun destroyer crashed on South Ataria island in the Ogosawara islands south of Japan. Humanity salvaged the wreck, dubbing the advanced tech it contained "Overtechnology", unified the world's governments after a brief bout of internal conflict, and began erecting new defenses against the possibility of hostile alien contact... starting with the reconstruction of the gun destroyer, which was to become the SDF-1 Macross. The Zentradi caught up to the fleeting Meltrandi ship ten years later, and the booby traps buried in the Macross's original computer fired its main gun at them automatically, starting the first space war.
Events-wise, the war was much different... the Macross had ARMD-01 and -02 for its arms, the Prometheus having gotten blasted in half during the opening salvos of the orbital bombardment. It still fled to Pluto's orbit with the island's population aboard, and fought its way back. Basically, watch DYRL to be filled in on most of this stuff.
After the war nominally ended in 2010 and the Zentradi uprisings stopped when their leader fled into space using a repaired ship, humanity started launching colony missions into deep space, so that another cataclysmic war would never wipe out its entire population. The first ship was launched in 2012, the SDF-2 Megaroad-01, which finally left the Sol system with its escort of next-generation VF-4 Siren fighters in 2014. Thereafter, small skirmishes with rogue Zentradi fleets left over from the Boddole Zer 465th Main Fleet and other forces occurred fairly frequently, followed by major incursions in 2036 and 2037 led by Zentradi officers who'd fled the aftermath of their defeat by humanity, and a new major incursion in 2054 started by colony ships that ran headlong into a Zentradi main fleet, before petering out into occasional skirmishes with scout forces and the like once every decade or so. There are still a couple thousand fleets of Zentradi and Meltrandi kicking around the galaxy, each about the same size as Boddole Zer's 465th Main fleet (about 4.8 million ships strong).
In 2091, humanity ran into the Mardook (yes, that's the correct spelling) when one of their recon forces fold jumped into Jupiter's vicinity, and assumed they were Zentradi because they use Zentradi ships, starting the events of the OVA. The Mardook are hinted to be another group of Protoculture who escaped the collapse of their civilization 498,000 years ago, which retained or reclaimed control over some of the Zentradi and Meltrandi forces, and are on a militant mission to save their culture from extinction by killing the hell out of everything that might be a threat to it. Earth is but one of many populated planets both inside and outside its solar system, and there are millions of humans and Zentradi and hybrids on Earth at any given time, brought about by cloning (early on), the good old fashioned way, and periodic influxes of new immigrants from defeated Zentradi fleets.
Technologically,
Macross II is WAY different from
Robotech. Humanity's been reverse-engineering and adapting overtechnology from the Zentradi and Meltrandi, and often combining the two into something new. They've always had a good, firm grasp of all the technology they use (whereas in RT, humanity doesn't really know how their stuff works), and have evolved their military hardware based on lessons learned and technological advances instead of reinventing the wheel.
Explaining all of that could take a LONG time... sufficed to say,
Macross's setting is usually a massive leg-up on what
Robotech's Earth Forces have, and in some areas
Macross's UN Forces are more advanced than even what the Robotech Masters were capable of (especially WRT cloning).
The fighters in
Macross II are the result of decades of technological advancement. Contrary to what the RPG claims, they're actually very new... the VF-XX is about 30 years old and has been largely phased out except for a few units of the Zentradi Marines, while the VF-2SS Valkyrie II is only 10 years old, the VF-2JA is only 5 years old, and the VA-1SS Metal Siren is brand spanking new. (The RPG missed a bunch of intermediate designs, like the VF-4 Siren, the Refined Valkyrie, VF-4S Super Siren, and the original VF-2 Valkyrie II, which collectively cover 2012-2072.) The fighters in the OVA are a synthesis of humanity's Variable Fighter technology and Zentradi/Meltrandi battle suit technology, making them far more durable, faster, increasing their generator output threefold, and so on.
The UN Forces use a mixture of captured Zentradi ships taken from various fleets they've beaten and new ships developed on their own. Their fleet's kinda light in 2091-2092 because they took a real pounding in 2054 that cost them most of the fleet they had, and they've been rebuilding ever since. Classes of ship like the standard battleship, the
Heracles, the
Gloria, and the Macross Cannons are all post-2054 developments, while older classes of human-built ship like the old
Daedalus II-class space carriers and
Macross-class fortresses have been retired.
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