Welcome to the Solid State Society
Key-word, "Most Europeans"—"Most monarchies" (more than "Most Europeans" anyway) are very mindful of religion, even those presiding over secularized states (see Denmark), so we're not dealing with the average denizen of New Port City (who I wouldn't be surprised doesn't really care about the church or their so-called 'princess'). The government of the Sanc Kingdom is almost comically small, something that often leads itself to a level of ideological and philosophical purity (on top of the monarchy). Relena herself perhaps not so much given her age, but her ministers, not to mention the invariable clergy...I'm not suspecting they'd literally complain about the differently-theological officers posted by Brussels to that area. Disraeli is very clearly not Lutheran, and very clearly a foreigner, and in charge of a squadron or so of mobile dolls, but he's not deliberately antagonizing Relena's government (if anything, he's overly polite, at least on appearances). Peter Paul II isn't worried about Catholics killing each other in OZ's infighting, he's worried about central Europe (and, potentially, Earth and the Earth-Sphere) burning in flames, and he knows he has limited influence among both the troops and the military leadership, and hopes he can capitalize on that. The same for the Dalai Lama and the Patriarch of Moscow, if they're still around (I haven't thought of that yet either). Of course, whether he can be of any success isn't certain.
As it happens, I'm writing this from a Taiwanese perspective—we know even less about Christians than the Japanese do (for starters, we are much less likely to run into them, hmmm). So I'm always interested in varying western perspectives, otherwise I wouldn't ask. For a mecha anime, Gundam Wing certainly has no qualms talking about God, but we're dealing with a pretty different philosophical environment than the half-humanity left in the Universal Century, so it's not surprising. Religious piety is not going to make or break the inter-OZ conflict, but it's definitely going to have an influence on many localities caught up in the fighting (even with a long-view of the AC period, I wouldn't be surprised at seeing sectarian fighting hitch a ride on the inter-military conflict).
On the subject of job security and Treize Khushrenada, I actually see it a little different: the Romefeller Foundation never made a move to dismantle existing military divisions in the lead up or after the adoption of the mobile doll, even after it had been normalized in use. OZ keeps using huge numbers of conventional troops in other non-mobile doll branches (the navy, for example), out of necessity certainly. There are human commanders for mobile dolls (in one particular scene, a manned Taurus orders mobile dolls directly to fight guerrillas). Barge itself is not automated, and it features a number of human troops alongside mobile dolls. Practical limitations, not to mention political factors, mean that mobile dolls are never really going to replace the existing MS Troops, so much as reinforce them (for the foreseeable future). If there plan is to eventually reduce the MS Troops to a skeleton force, it's going to be a long, difficult, and possibly impossible road.
I don't think the Treizists in general are as afraid of losing their livelihood (probably some are), but that's less convincing a rallying cry for sailors, soldiers, and their officers outside he MS Troops, so much as the "writing on the wall"—that mobile dolls are being introduced to fundamentally alter the course of the war, to allow the leadership to implement hasty operations at the drop of a hat with no consideration for military or civilian casualties, to free them from political responsibility, on top of the removal of Treize (the benefactor of some cult of personality). It doesn't mean certain units aren't at threat of being replaced entirely, but especially when it becomes clear that both sides of OZ want every competent pilot they can get their hands on, it's not the only motivation or even the primary one.
Well, that, and it's hard to imagine that OZ couldn't afford to pay owed pensions to officers forced into early retirement—and that officers thinking of their wives (and husbands) and children would willing jeopardize their families just to force a war to keep their jobs (especially putting those salaries into jeopardy). Livelihood's definitely a factor, just not a direct primary one to me. Certainly pride in their careers and skills is influential too—this makes you wonder how the civil governments handled the hundreds of thousands or even millions of Alliance military personnel who peaceably or otherwise surrendered and were eventually re-integrated back into society, those who couldn't get jobs in OZ or weren't dead.
edited 14th Nov '15 10:40:34 PM by Synthesis
The future of warfare in UC.
A terrible thought has infiltrated my brain.
Cima X Bernie.
edited 25th Nov '15 11:08:38 AM by Night
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The Struggler
Why.
You gotta start somewhere.
The future of warfare in UC.
Burnt-out veteran with self-loathing issues and wide-eyed rookie who reminds her that there are people who still care, and things still worth fighting for.
Bernie is throwing Cima a lifejacket for her sanity.
edited 25th Nov '15 11:40:42 AM by Night
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...that sounds AWESOME. ![[awesome]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/minis/award_star_gold_3.png "[awesome]"){kind=small}
Do it.
Fandom Heretic
Double go for it.
The Struggler
GO FOR IT!
You gotta start somewhere.
Pronounced YAK-you-luss
Well, Cima is a Haman expy facing off against a pretty crappy Judau. It's only fair her Mashmyre should be of somewhat higher quality. 
edited 25th Nov '15 5:03:50 PM by Iaculus
What's precedent ever done for us?
The future of warfare in UC.
Combined two short interludes to produce this.
One's the "When Icelina Met Garma" thing I've already done, though it's touched up. The other is "The Wages of Sin", where Cima reflects on the destruction of New York.
edited 26th Nov '15 4:18:55 PM by Night
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Fandom Heretic
Wait, Cima's the Zeon chick from 0083, right? Just making sure I remember correctly.
The future of warfare in UC.
Yes.
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Fandom Heretic
Okay, I thought that was her.
Months ago, I mentioned my idea of Amuro piloting an EXAM-equipped NT-1. Recently, I had another idea in that regard: after the events of 0083, the NT-1 is taken away from Amuro and given to the Titans for research purposes. Thus, Amuro's Zeta-era suit of choice would be a Delta Gundamnote in the Hi-Nu's color scheme.
As for why he gets the Delta instead of just a Hyaku Shiki is because I thought, with Amuro having some machinery knowhow, he'd probably be able to help Anaheim finish the transformation system and field the Delta instead of forcing them to downgrade it into the Hyaku Shiki like in canon. Plus it would have an additional meaning as well: in physics, the delta is the symbol of change, here lampshading the fact that Amuro's Peggy Sue knowledge is slowly driving history off the rails.
Needless to say, Delta Gundam and Zeta Gundam fighting side by side = the Titans get assraped without lube. Now, what to do with the ZZ cast... I'm thinking that there would be a DD Gundam, which I'm envisioning as something between a slimmer version of the FA Hyaku Shiki Kai and basically the Gryps-era equivalent of a Nu Gundam Double Fin Funnel Type.
Of course, compromises are made due to the fact that Gryps-era tech is not yet advanced enough to build the actual Nu Gundam. Less miniaturization means the fin funnels are bigger and fewer in number. They are also a bit slower and sluggish due to their bigger size and the fact that the DD doesn't have a psycoframe, only a psycommu (as Amuro was wary of sharing the psycoframe's idea with Anaheim, since the Titans could've extorted it from them). However, their size also means that, while the fin funnels are attached, the DD can use them as extra boosters, making it exactly as fast as the ZZ (which is to say, really frickin' fast).
What do you guys think?
edited 27th Nov '15 3:45:13 PM by amitakartok
Fandom Heretic
I think "DD Gundam" is a very unfortunate name for a machine of war.
How else do you acronymize Double Delta? I mean, if you can do Double Zeta as ZZ.
Fandom Heretic
D2, perhaps?
Seems to have worked for the Victory Gundam's successor machine.
Hmm... sounds reasonable. I like it.
D2 it is.
The future of warfare in UC.
A random thought about the later UC and the Federation's slow collapse, and how to divert it.
"I know you don't believe that." Bright shook his head.
"Gihren was a madman, but he had a gift with words and such things cannot be summoned from whole cloth. He needed an in. 'We are stronger for the need to destroy those who assail us,' contained just enough truth. Complacency ruled the Federation, and men of vision were unwelcome until Zeon and the flaws it exposed made them too precious to ignore. Jamitov was such a man, misused though his vision was. You, Revil, Ajan, you have put your talents to better use. Humanity is too large, too important, to be placed under the leadership of one polity."
"Because then the lack of competition induces stagnation. You're saying we need a Zeon, so we have someone to try and be better than."
"And we need a Federation, so that our mistakes do not go unchallenged. War may destroy us both, but we are stronger for the need to be better than our neighbors."
edited 29th Nov '15 4:57:38 PM by Night
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Welcome to the Solid State Society
I'm reminded of a fourth-wall-breaking theoretical conversation between Full Frontal and Banagher Links (with Bright Noa in company) a friend of my proposed.
"Let me win. Or you'll be doing this forever. Against us, or the Martians, or the pirates, or the Jovians. Or do you WANT G-Reco?"
D2 conjures unfortunate memories of Code Geass for me personally, but I think it's an elegant solution nonetheless (you couldn't just have two Greek 'Deltas' in a line, right, and call it "Delta Delta"—that be a pain probably.)
edited 30th Nov '15 9:44:49 AM by Synthesis
The future of warfare in UC.
Delta Squared
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I've also been wondering what to do with the ZZ. Should Kamille get it and hand the Zeta down to Judau, or should Kamille keep using the Zeta out of habit and pass the ZZ to Judau? The latter approach also considers the fact that Judau and Roux sucked with the Zeta in canon because it was custom-tuned for Kamille to begin with, so having Kamille switch to the ZZ would be sub-optimal.
On to the next issue. I'm thinking that Amuro's decades-honed piloting skills result in him trashing everybody he goes up against, beginning with wrecking Char's Zaku and capturing him alive. When the White Base reaches Luna II, transferring Char to the base's brig is considered but ultimately decided against on the basis that one man is not valuable enough for Zeon forces to attempt a rescue operation, especially with them not even knowing he's alive. Plus there's also the fact that if Char were to break out and start sabotaging stuff, he can do much more damage in Luna II than on the White Base. So Char remains in White Base custody and is eventually turned over to the Jaburo garrison.
We have a problem here, though. With Char out of the picture, the White Base wouldn't be redirected during atmospheric entry, thus skipping the North America and Eurasia arcs. So not only Garma wouldn't get captured, the Federation would lose the battle of Odessa due to Amuro not being there to expose M'Quve's inside man. I'm already planning on them losing Odessa anyway due to a combination of the Gundam wreaking havoc in Asia causing M'Quve to concentrate more troops at the base, plus the Gundam itself, not having magnetic coating yet, breaking down in the middle of the battle, so we can't have that.
I'm also planning on Garma being nabbed alive as well, so The Stations of the Canon still need to be traversed somehow. The question is, how?
- Option 1: Amuro somehow convinces Bright to deliberately land in the middle of enemy territory. Garma and Ramba both join Char in the brig eventually, with the three ultimately being dropped off at Jaburo.
- Option 2: The White Base reaches Jaburo according to plan. Char is dropped off at the base. Then the brass decides to send the White Base off to raise hell behind enemy lines and participate in Odessa before returning to Jaburo, nabbing Garma and Ramba along the way as a bonus. Runs the risk of potentially being accused of ripping off Gran Tomino.
Which do you think would be better? In either scenario, the victory at Odessa spikes up Zeon morale enough that they launch a full-scale assault on Jaburo. They end up being repelled and suffering massive casualties, but not before a commando team infiltrates the base to rescue Garma. They only manage to get Char out instead, who is sent to Solomon and grilled by Dozle for every last bit of intel he gathered during his captivity. With Garma being interred at Jaburo, Degwin forbids the use of weapons of mass destruction for cracking the base open, so the Apsalus project is scrapped ahead of schedule. Hence how Shiro and co. end up assigned to the White Base.
Welcome to the Solid State Society
I like that, 'Delta^2', for the aforementioned reasons. Fewer syllables too.
So, some flavor text from Walker's Account that I'm not sure I'll ever use, from a brief visit to the Lake Victoria academy later in the Catalonia-Khushrenada split. Since I'm assuming an Earth Sphere where most food production does, in fact, come from Earth (just one more means of economic control over the colonies), a few centuries of geo-politics and climate transformation (in a slightly different direction than what we well on its way in UC) has seen sub-Saharan African built into the world's breadbasket. Of course, soldiers need to eat. When A. Mazuri speculates that he didn't want to group up to be just another sailor, or just another farmer, this is part of what he means (though despite Walker's suggestion, it goes beyond the Congolese states).
And then there were the Congolese States, the breadbasket of Africa—indeed, the world. Sometime between the end of the United States of America and the inauguration of the After Colony period, several years of dust storms turned the agricultural center of Earth Sphere, the North American continent, into an expanding desert, which had taken decades to recover from. The reasons behind the disaster, and whether it had been inevitable, were still debate endlessly. Of course, food was still grown in North America: agriculture was everywhere, including Antarctica thanks to hydroponics and greenhouses. They grew food in China and Italy as well, after all. But the breadbasket of the world, the farms that fed not just Earth but the budding space colonies, for nearly two centuries, were found in south central Africa. A 'Green Revolution' beginning in AC 20 had laid the foundation—rich from economic growth, the African Union, and then the UESA, demilitarized a continent previously associated with intermittent irregular and regular warfare. Looking at any military map, you could see the ring of military installations, schools and airfields—Kampala, Nairobi, Mombasa, Zanzibar, Luanda, Shewa Robit—that encircled the nearly a million square kilometers of farmland. Beyond there, you'd be lucky if you found so much as a barracks or a depot, much less another academy. It made a number of old Congolese, Angolan and Zambian family conglomerates extremely wealthy, and the general population decently well-off, though industrial farming might have been a hard and boring way of life for the average youth. At the center of it was the African headquarters of the Alliance Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, a massive Akademgorodok Walker had only seen magazine photographs of, roughly half the size of Windsor. Its headquarters was an ancient brown building from which the rest of the city spun out, the old National Institute for Agronomy of the Belgian Congo. He thought those 20th Century government functionaries were probably spinning in their graves fast enough to power a library and a few offices.
And it was all Foundation territory. By virtue of being demilitarized, the heartland of the southern Africa was comfortably secure to Romefeller at present. Treizist battalions, concentrated around Lake Victoria, couldn't hope to secure a million square kilometers and tens of millions of people distributed between a dozen small local principalities and twice as many small republics. At most, they could siphon off shipments that were bound for the military anyway, including a few that would purposefully end up in Treizist hands, courtesy of shady deal making, sympathizers, or simple errors on the paperwork. A misplaced digit in the contracted name of a particular battalion or division, or two swapped numbers on a manifest date. It was the sort of thing that the Alliance would have never tolerated, one assumed, but but in the early days after May what few regiments were posted in the area were swept aside by airborne troops out of Lake Victoria and Nairobi. They couldn't even think of it nostalgically.
edited 30th Nov '15 11:31:55 AM by Synthesis
Welcome to the Solid State Society
I'd say I like Option 2 more, just because the crux of Option 1, Amuro convincing Bright to break with previous orders (as I understand it) is pretty hard to picture. That may be a lack of imagination on my part (and I'm no doubt missing some other context).
Bright doesn't know yet that Amuro is a Peggy Sue, as Amuro wants to establish some level of trust before sharing his secret. With that said, Amuro still advises Bright. Bright is in charge, but Amuro is The Consigliere.
Religion simply isn't that important to most Europeans. Nationality might be, religion's relevance is mostly in the Hitler reference or the terrorism one.
edited 14th Nov '15 4:30:08 AM by Night
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