Aldnoah Zero

Interesting first episode... On the princess being alive, I see half and half chance of it. Either Urobuchi is killing idealistic characters on the first episode to let us know the tone of it or, and what I believe, the princess survived, probably making use of that power of the Gods mentioned that she embodies. Though that theory has the question of why did the Martian assassins not take the power into account? And the assassins definitely seem to be Martian remnants on Earth from the last war, the missile guys did say while setting everything up that it was finally paying off to have laid low for so long

@danna

- The guy who did it made a mistake and it was pointed out. Mods said there's no way to merge, so might be best to close the other one and use this as the main thread for the show if we can call for a mod.

@Woodguy #17 and 23 in the other thread:

Technological and logistical advance of the stated magnitude in the stated timeframe would be possible with the discovery of an energy source far more economical than what we've found so far and materials of far greater utility than what we have today or a significant revolution in the manufacturing process. Given that they're hand-waving "alien tech", I suspect we've got both or all of those.

There's also the distinct possibility that most of their materiel is simply directly lifted from the alien wreckage with just enough post-its to explain key functions to the operator.

@Scherzo 09, #19 and 22

The Cold War can be explained away by earth's governments having a collective Oh shit. moment upon discovering alien ruins on the moon.

Colonies are usually convenient dumping grounds for those who are politically or ideologically inconvenient. They also tend to attract people who are significantly more capable than the norm back home. Given those constraints, quick rebellion and rapid advancement upon discovery of alien technology would not be unexpected.

The monarchy thing could easily be a quirk of whichever the dominant ethnic group in the colonies happened to be. It's also a natural outgrowth of one man taking control of the original colony along with his ideological allies.

edited 7th Jul '14 12:53:32 AM by HighVelocityPointyThings

I'd prefer to keep the other thread. This one is mostly pre-release chatter. And the name is wrong

This strikes me as incredibly unlikely. If anything, I'd expect it to intensify as the sides tried to steal alien tech

This isn't a usual colony. They'd have to be idiots to send people likely to rebel on a research mission of alien hypertech

And it took America over a century and a half to rebel, not to mention the Australians never did

...No. It's a complete cultural change. I don't think anything can explain that

If you want, one can ask the mod to edit the titles to not confuse any readers.

So is the idea of discovering alien ruins on the moon. It's entirely possible that the timelines diverged earlier than shown: The 1970's are just the first point at which the divergence becomes noteworthy.

They sent 340,000 people. That's a little bit more than what you'd typically send on a research expedition. Plus, America never had quite as great an incentive to claim all the riches for themselves.

Not as great a change as you might think. Given that political participation in the west is normally limited to showing up at the odd election and checking a box, it's not hard to imagine a feudal system taking hold purely on the premise of doing away with all the horrible campaigning.

About the how and why of the Vers Empire coming about. The implication I'm getting is that there's not really equipment for space warfare (particularly space-to-space warfare) outside those developed from the Martian alien tech. There wouldn't exactly be much use for it until the Vers Empire shows up.

Considering this, it probably wouldn't take too much for the Martian rebellion to win. Once they've taken over any Earth-controlled government on the planet, there's no a whole lot Earth could do to invade and take it back.

As such, it's possible the rebellion wasn't even a really popular thing among the Martian settlers, it could just basically be one guy wants power and control over the alien technology, and already possesses knowledge and availability to it since he's the head researcher of it, convincing enough people to form an army (perhaps the first start using Cataphracts) to kick out the Earth government. After that there probably wouldn't be too much resistance from the other settlers.

It's only after this point that Earth would really start trying to find ways to counter the Vers Empire, and by that point the Empire already has access to tech that far surpasses what Earth has.

Even then, the only way they can be that much advanced than earth is when they can block most of the information about research going into earth. Which is stupid considering 1. Rebellion didn't happened for last seven years & 2. During first wave of rebellion, their emperor was arrested by earthen army. Earth doesn't seems to be any better than what we have here in real life, while these guys are as good as any general space faring civilization. Even if they discovered something that vastly advances human civilization, there should be some traces of discovery on earth as well.

Looking only at the government, that's just barely plausible, but the rest of the societal changes really aren't. People don't change their religion that easily, and it should take a few generations for them to stop identifying as Terran

This one is easy enough, actually— We can assume they were using Martian tech for construction

The timeline seems rather implausible, unless the head researcher dude found some alien brainwashing tech. Then a lot of things fall into place. If he wanted to become RULER OF THE WORLD or whatever, forcing cultural shifts and racism make sense - easier for the Martians to go to earth and slaughter Terrans. Monarchy also obviously makes sense.

I dunno I simply don't get Sci Fi anime's obsession with Hereditary Monarchy. At least in stuff like Legends Of Galactic Heroes there's at least a massive timescale to play with. But here it's fucking seven years.And that's putting aside the fact that we didn't have the technology to move people en masse from the Earth to the Moon in the 70s.

I wanna avoid Valvrave comparisons but maybe it's something like what happened with the Magius (colonists from Earth end up getting body-jacked by martian aliens with no bodys of their own who have to use bodies of other species)

also to

in Aldnoah there was a teleporter in the moon that that made travelling to mars possible (the Hypergate)

edited 7th Jul '14 3:50:29 PM by bassgs435

Ahh yes, after a whole episode of exposition, nothing better to end it with than a {{Nuke 'em}} scenario. Classic Gen, classic.

edited 7th Jul '14 4:46:13 PM by BlackYakuzu94

"From Earth to the Moon". NASA's budget start taking a sharp dive in 1967. And even if that didn't happen, it would still take years, if not decades, for the development of a mass transporter.

Re: The rapid cultural change

I don't think it's as incredible a change as some of you are making it out to be. I've witnessed good friends completely change their positions on major portions of their personal philosophy within a few months of simply moving to a different city.

Moving to not just to a different planet, but from a relative paradise to a Hell World, coupled with presumably continuous exposure to the remnants of an ancient alien civilization and no easy way to return to earth would believably explain the rapid cultural shift based on what I've seen of how people react to change.

I do agree though that moving tens or hundreds of thousands of people even as far as the moon in the 1970's does strain my credibility. Without doing the math, it might be possible if you completely re-purposed the ICBM infrastructure to shoving people and materiel into orbit, then had a few large earth-moon shuttles - but the logistics challenge involved would still be absolutely enormous.

edited 7th Jul '14 5:13:10 PM by HighVelocityPointyThings

Well, the Cold War did end, and there was crazy alien tech up for grabs. Makes sense that there'd be lots of re-purposing of resources.

The colonization effort may have used Martian tech

I think they found the hypergate on the moon. I would guess they either found or built another one on earth and used the moon as a relay point.

The impression I got was Emperror Vers decided to keep all the martian tech for himself, earth didn't like that, WAR, then the moon blew up and ended the war since Earth and Mars couldn't reach each other without the gate.

Somehow the premise of the show reminds me of Gundam AGE. But I still wanna watch it though.

After reading the comparison essays, so that's why people were spamming "Marco Polo Bridge Incident" on the video page.

I don't think hypergate technology is easily replicateable, once the one on the Moon was borked, Mars seems reliant on kinetic energy spaceflight between Mars and Earth.

I really hope it turns out that there is something that drove the Mars folks insane and thats why they think they're this super long lasting empire that is so different from Humanity.

Otherwise its just silly.

It's Urobochi, so that's probably a good possibility.

Well so far the only Martians we've even seen are royalty. Most of which look young enough to have been born after the empire started. So it's still kind of up in the air if every Martian thinks like that.

edited 7th Jul '14 8:45:23 PM by KuroBaraHime

Before everyone gets further into the discussion, I need to ask... Someone mentioned that the studio wanted to turn this into a franchise that can rival Gundam. Can I get a quote on that? Because it kind of seems far-fetched for a Urobutcher series.