@Cataphrak: So armatures are capable of independent drop/re-entry and independent takeoff?
That’s unique! (Especially since it’s practically mandatory in the Gundam material to have at least one scene where people try to play games in re-entry and get killed doing it.)
@Nocturnal_Stillness
No transforming, sorry. Within the setting there’s really no point, especially since being aerodynamic is kind of superfluous in hard vacuum.
@Iggles
I prefer to use the long-range machine, mostly because it’s equipped with an armour-piercing particle rifle than can punch through the heaviest armour without exposing my character to any danger. I *do* have to be careful when enemies get close though, because that machine doesn’t have a lot of speed or armour.
CoDEC is technically only a temporary alliance of various colony worlds, each ruled by an elected planetary assembly. However, for the duration of the war, CoDEC’s military forces are run by a “Defence Committee” made up of representatives from the various assemblies and military leaders.
I have no guarantees that betraying CoDEC will cause others to follow. That depends entirely on your reputation and your relationship with the other NPCs.
The Empire of Humanity Ascendant was the result of a gradual process of centralisation and stagnation within the original Colonial Authority, the organization which ended up unifying most of Earth’s nation-states and presided over the golden age of human colonization and exploration. There’s a more indepth description in the reference section.
@WinterHawk
Your personality scores will also affect your snap responses in certain situations, as well as your perception of certain scenarios. If, for example, a heavily outmatched enemy force decides to cut their losses and run, a player character with a high warrior score might see their retreat as cowardice, while one with a high diplomat score might regard it as self-preservation.
Reputation does have social implications, but it’s directly informed by how well your deeds in battle are known. Great feats of arms will boost your reputation, but committing war crimes will give you penalties as well.
@Dusk777
Combat armatures require technology which is currently isn’t possible today, at all. Fuel alone (combat armatures run on matter/antimatter reactors) would cost hundreds of trillions of US dollars to produce with today’s technology for a single sortie, at least.
Humanity’s only colonised about a dozen star systems, of those, about half are CoDEC controlled, and the rest are Imperial-held, though Imperial colonies, being older, tend to be more densely settled and industrialised.
FTL in this setting involves a rapid (one every few minutes) series of FTL “hops” to get from one point to another. The quality of an FTL drive determines how much distance these jumps cover. An old freighter might have a drive which could manage jumps of 18 or 20 light-hours per jump. A top-of-the-line warship like the Caliburn has a drive which can do up to 88 light-hours per jump under normal circumstances. The end result means that it still takes days or weeks to travel from one system to another.
@WulfyK
I’m aiming for “One big lie”, with most of the stuff that blatantly violates the laws of physics being based on variable-mass technology.
@817819
Yes, mostly because a combat armature can engage targets from much longer ranges. Normally, combat armatures engage at relatively short range simply to reduce lead time on their weapons, but unlike their normal opponents, Godzilla is big and relatively slow, so they could open fire from much further away. Atomic breath is only so useful when your opponent is blasting you from 600 km away.
@CJW
There are about half a dozen full epilogues, each different enough to warrant their own scene files.
It won’t be a chance to swap loadout after every battle, but you will have an opportunity or two to change up your machine’s weaponry through the course of the story.
@Ramidel
I figured it’d be something that combat armatures would be able to do, especially considering all the stuff they can pull off otherwise. It wouldn’t make too much sense to me for a combat armature to have the thrust to make the kind of manoeuvres they do in battle, and not be able to exit and not be able to exist planetary gravity wells with relative easy. That being said, they still need to be careful in re-entry, and have a few things to stop them from burning up.
There’s no re-entry fight where one of the sympathetic enemies tries to kill you and ends up burning up in atmo though.
@Cataphrak Sweet. Now if there is another, fast and semi armoured combat armature with either lances or a Scythe as a melee weapon and an all black black paint job, and a snarky head mechanic (please tell me this will be a thing) this will be even more of an automatic 5 star game. Will a high presence and diplomatic player be able to convince Imperial soldiers and officers to defect with some regularity? Is it possible for a combat armature to disable or destroy a warship using only melee weapons, or do we have to use ranged weapons? And finally, last one I promise 
, Is it possible to get anon spoilery estimations of total grunts, warships, armatures, and other assorted war material of both CoDEC and the Empire?
@Iggles
No scythe or lance, but you can paint your machine all black, and your deck chief will have sufficient amounts of snark (honestly, this *is* me we’re talking about).
High presence and the right choices will allow you to stage one or two defections from the enemy, but mostly, if you’re making high-presence choices, you’ll either be talking them into withdrawing or surrendering.
It is possible to destroy a warship with only melee weapons, and that is something you can do if you make the right choices.
As for numbers, the Empire has over three hundred warships in service, with some in garrison duty, others acting as independent battlegroups, and the rest concentrated into the Imperial Grand Fleet. They’re also fielding about three thousand combat armatures, most of which are deployed on planetary or orbital garrisons, with maybe a third of those assigned to the Grand Fleet and independent battlegroups.
CoDEC has a much smaller fleet: maybe one hundred thirty ships or so, but almost all are currently arranged to respond to an imperial attack. The first line of defence is a series of carrier battlegroups (the Caliburn is flagship of one of these battlegroups). Behind them is the CoDEC Advanced Fleet, which serves as CoDEC’s main striking arm. Behind them is an emergency fleet only to be used as a last-ditch defence force, the CoDEC Strategic Reserve. In addition, CoDEC can field about twelve hundred combat armatures, with (one again) about a third of these being carrier-based.
Both sides also field tens of thousands of armoured vehicles for policing and support roles, but you don’t get to see much of them since you’ll be spending most of your time in space. In total, both CoDEC and the Empire have military organizations in the tens of millions fighting on behalf of populations in the billions.
Is there a big difference between the Armatures of the Empire and the CoDEC? I.e are we fighting against superior models?
@Nocturnal_Stillness
Kind of.
Imperial combat armatures are designed around a certain doctrine: namely, allowing a core of highly trained volunteer pilots to close in with the enemy, while they’re being supported by a much larger body of conscript-pilots flying support machines. Conscripts make up the vast majority of Imperial pilots, and their machines were designed and built by the lowest bidder. They’re still a threat if you get careless or outnumbered, but the more obvious danger comes from the volunteer pilots. These men and women are highly trained and motivated, and fly machines which are faster, more agile and equipped with weapons more advanced than anything CoDEC has (at first). While the fastest of your starting machines might be able to keep up, flying the other two means you have to find a way to use these enemy machines relatively thin armour against them.
An important thing to note is that there was no colonial military before the rebellion: while the Empire’s machines are custom built to military specifications, the first generation of CoDEC combat armatures (which you start in the cockpit of) are industrial armatures converted to military use through conversion kits originally designed to modify civilian machines to counter pirate attacks. These machines are relatively tough, easy to fly and extremely reliable, but they aren’t really a match for better Imperial machines (unless they’re being flown by an ace pilot, of course). Later on in the war, CoDEC began designing and producing their own military-grade combat armatures, which most of your lance-mates are equipped with. These machines are more capable of taking on higher-tier imperial mecha, though they’re still not quite as fast.
A third main difference is in weaponry: namely the fact that the Imperial military has managed to hold onto the expertise and facilities required to create monosabres: liquid-metal blades shaped to a monomolecular edge by a containment field. On the other side, a CoDEC-aligned defence contractor was able to perfect the technology required for effective miniaturization of particle weaponry shortly after the rebellion began. The end result is that the imperials have monosabres, but no particle rifles, with the exact opposite being true for CoDEC.
That being said, both sides are developing a new generation of high-performance combat armatures to try to break the deadlock.
Will our Ace be wearing a skin tight jumpsuit?
This is a requirement.
@Cataphrak So CoDEC has no viable melee weapons that can compare to the as pure’s monosabers until we gain control of one of the production facilities which are probably some of the most guarded installations outside of the Sol system. Will we be able at any point be able to smash into another combat armature and viscerally rip out the Imperial pilot and crush him in our armature’s hands/claws/metalthingys? How suspicious do we have to be of Imperial Intelligence? Will they do the standard recon, thorn in our side type intelligence work or actively attempt assassinations and blackmail? Which do you feel is more important to a close combat melee fighting combat armature, speed or armour and why?
@Cataphrak I should have rephrased that better. How expensive is a combat armature compared to some mundane item there or normal military vehicle?
@Sneaks
Indeed. pilot suits are made of ballistics-resistant gel sandwiched between two layers of “smartfabric” which can redistribute itself based on the pilot’s body shape. In addition to being perfectly skin-tight, these suits also provide basic protection against the elements and low-velocity shrapnel, and have sensors which feed into the flight computer’s predictive piloting system, making machines easier to fly.
@Iggles
CoDEC combat armatures do come with melee weapons. While the basic chainknife is nowhere near as effective as an imperial monosabre, the melee specialist machine is equipped with a plasma cutter: basically an immense cutting torch shaped into a blade by a containment field. It’s extremely power-hungry and inefficient, but it can cut through armour like warm butter, and its containment field is actually capable of parrying the field on a monosabre.
TL/DR: It’s a beam sabre.
You won’t be able to ever crack open a cockpit and crush the gooey insides, simply because weapons are so high powered in this setting that if you breach the cockpit, chances are, whoever’s inside is toast anyways, via compression or convection.
Imperial Military Intelligence plays a role in the story, as does CoDEC’s own Fleet Intelligence Service. I will not spoil any more.
When it comes to close combat in this setting, speed is a lot more important than armour in melee, simply because machines equipped specifically for melee combat have high-powered weapons which can cut through armour of any thickness almost effortlessly.
@Dusk777
Combat armatures are extremely expensive, both to produce and to maintain. Even the most inexpensive models seen in Mecha Ace cost about a third as much as a point-defence frigate. The Caliburn’s combat armature complement (your lance) cost about a fifth as much as the carrier itself. On top of that, a single combat armature needs maintenance crews of up to four or five dozen skilled technicians to keep it in fighting trim. However, the advantages of combat armatures as a weapon in both ground, and especially space combat are so great that both sides keep building them.
How expensive are ace suits compared to Poor Bloody Armatures?
@Ramidel
There isn’t much of a different here. The machines that aces use are generally the same ones that “grunt” pilots use, the difference being that high-scoring aces can often get dispensation to modify their machines with after-market parts. You have the option of selecting a modification like that at the beginning of the story.
That being said, veteran units with good combat records usually get new machines before less experienced or less effective ones. Your lance, as an elite unit, is near the top of the priority list.
Okay, so ace suits aren’t Gundams, they’re Zakus with bigger engines strapped on (and CoDEC aces have actual military armatures instead of armed industrial vehicles). Good to know.
@Cataphrak One last question for now. Is it 6/13 yet? Can’t wait to destroy those reb-… Imperial! To crush those Imperial dogs!
How are Combat Armatures piloted?
Can you tell us a little bit about how the pilots are selected and trained?
@Sneaks
Combat armatures are piloted through a combination of control interfaces. The two most prominent are two throttles, one on each side of the pilot’s seat. These control main thrusters, the machine’s arms, and weapons. A second pair of control interfaces lock around the pilot’s feet and lower legs. These control the machine’s legs and secondary thrust vectoring. Lastly, the machine is hooked up to sensors in the pilot’s suit, which detect shifts in body weight and posture, which are fed into the flight computer’s predictive piloting module to make minute adjustments with thrusters and register things like head movement (so that the machine’s long-range sensors are oriented in the same direction that the pilot is looking, for example).
CoDEC doesn’t really have a standardised system for training pilots. Generally, enlisted recruits and newly graduated officers will volunteer for pilot duty (and there’s no shortage of volunteers) right as they exit training. For the first few weeks, they learn theory. For the next month or so, they rack up hours on a simulator, which is basically a detached cockpit with simulated stimuli. Lastly, they spend another month training in a real (unarmed) machine. After about 100 simulation hours and 75 cockpit hours, they finally are sent to the fleet. The amount of experience they actually get from this sort of training is wholly inadequate, of course, but there’s a war on, and corners get cut.
As for the player character themselves, they joined much earlier on, before even this system was implemented. The player character’s training was very informal, he/she was probably just strapped into a cockpit with an instructor, and told to do basic movements until he/she got it right, and then learned the rest in combat.
Sounds like a massive amount of detail for your world, I am looking forward to this as I have played every Mech game I could get my hands on. 
How old will the MC be?
@WulfyK
The player character will start the game at an indeterminate age, but hints in the text imply that the player character is somewhere in his or her late 20s.
