Don't forget that you guys have access to the NUNS' Koenig Monster as well, giving you a bomber AND heavy bombardment mech in one unit. Destroids are also an option for more conventional, dedicated ground assault ops.
The Cheyenne II destroid in use with the Frontier fleet is on the smaller side of destroids being only 9 meters tall, however that is still as tall as a Knight Paladin model of Imperial Knight. The ADR-04-MK.XV Super Defender, an update of an original series design, is a fair bit taller at 11.27 meters.
Things get worse, for the Imperium, when we start discussing variable fighters. The aforementioned König stands at a height of 29 meters, taller than the 14 meter Warhound Scout Titan and 22 meter Reaver Battle Titan, and only a handful of meters shorter than the – sometimes – 32 meter Warlord Battle Titan. Okay I'm cheating a bit there since more than a few meters of a König in mecha mode are from the back-mounted barrels pointed up into the air, but its destroid predecessors were 22 meters tall and that's without them doing the mecha version of standing on the tips of their toes.
There aren't numbers for how tall the VF-171 Nightmare Plus, the mainstay variable fighter for the Frontier fleet, is but we do have them for the VF-25F Messiah. It is 14.53 meters tall and yet another mecha taller than the Warhound and far more ubiquitous. Taller still is the Queadluun-Rhea at 16.85 meters, though that doesn't technically count as it is a battle suit worn by full-sized Zentran and Meltran.
Of course size doesn't determine fighting ability, still the Coalition's ability to deploy mecha of such sizes en masse is going to mess with the Imperium for whom Knights and Titans are limited resources, badly.
I wouldn't give it good odds with Necron tech too. For Universes sake they figured out actual time travel without hopping into the Warp. The only people with bigger understanding of the Materium then the Necrons are the C'tan and they were the ones who taught them a lot of that in the first place.
The Kushan aren't the only folks adept at reverse engineering, that is a trait that applies to Macross humanity as well. The original show
The Super Dimension Fortress Macross takes place in the far off distant future of 2010, and its backstory describes the alien starship that eventually gets rebuilt by humanity into the titular SDF-1 as crashing on an island in the Pacific in 1999.
All of the more exotic technologies on display in the show are developed by humanity in the intervening eleven years after examining the crashed ship, including transforming mecha. No, the ability for the warship to transform into a giant robot was not a feature that came stock with the alien warship, that was an aftermarket modification thought up by humanity.
The Kushan are easily our best technological powerhouses. Their ships are big and solid, their fabricator tech is excellent, their FTL comms network does double duty as a resources network, they can inhale asteroid fields for resources at a rapid rate, and their ground vehicles are massive and powerful. They're also a relatively 'hard' sci-fi faction, which is both good and bad; they don't need too much in the way of phlebotium or whatever, but they also don't have much in the way of super-weapons beyond some Precursor stuff they can replicate but don't understand. And their 'ship AI' is actually brain uploading, which may be better than normal AI for Chaos junk. Their main weakness in our lineup is that the have very little experience with esoteric nonsense and magical whatsits, and are likely the most vulnerable to Warp shenanigans as a result. Having our more magically inclined factions work with them to get their fabricators to slather a metric ton of anti-daemon stuff onto all their ships will be an important step to avoid another 'Beast Mothership' incident. Other downside is that they have a relatively poor understanding of their own FTL drive, due to their productions of them being knockoff copies of a Precursor relic they found rather than something they invented themselves (if I'm remembering things right, it's been a while), making it harder to work with. Though they at least still have the original core still to study more. Also lagging in biotech.
A few corrections. For one, the Kushan do have traditional artificial intelligences. They are mentioned time and again, as are robots, in the literature and a number of unit descriptions however besides mentions they are not explored in depth so we have no idea how advanced either technology is. We do know that a great deal of Homeworld's manufacturing prowess comes from robotic automation and have an explicit mention that 25,000 robots, working alongside 10,000 organic technicians, were used to build to the original Mothership
Second, Homeworld does not have mind uploads. Destiny does and that is how Exos are created, but due to the nature of the transfer requires the transferred mind's memories be purged so as not to come to pieces when housed in a body that is not their own. This technology works with other species as well and is not limited to humans as evidenced by House of Salvation's creation of an Eliksni Exo.
What technology Homeworld does have is advanced mind-machine interfaces that allow individuals to be physically plugged into technology and exercise extensive control over the systems the interfaces grant access to.
Third, what the Hiigarans lack a full understanding of are the three Hyperspace Cores made by the Progenitors, not hyperdrives in general. Hyperspace Cores are not simply hyperdrives, they are immensely powerful power sources, and it is implied in the
History of Hiigara that the exponentially greater power limitations of Far Jumping is the primary roadblock to Far Jumping without access to a Hyperspace Core. Manufacturing hyperspace drives is easy enough to do and the reason why Homeworld 2 era Hiigaran capital ships do not come equipped with them by default is because only one ship in a formation needs a hyperdrive for all ships in it to be able to jump.
This is also a correction to my earlier statements about figuring out how to make Far Jumps work being immensely complicated. It is complicated and it is beyond even the Bentusi to easily replicate, but it appears the challenge is more in regards to devising a sufficiently powerful power source than it being the case that Far Jumping requires more complex hyperdrives.
While not a correction, a thing to note is during the Beast Wars the Somtaaw devised a rather brutal anti-Beast tactic which was to redirect the exhausts of their ships' fusion torch drives into the corridors of their vessels to burn away infections. It is hard to say if this tactic has become standard practice afterwards for dealing with boarding actions, it is still possible to capture an enemy ship with troops in the Homeworld 2 era, but if not it is one that could feasibly be reintroduced to conduct preliminary burns of warp daemons and taint.
In addition, there is a chance that by Homeworld 2 the Hiigarans did end up devising a means against protecting against psychic attacks. During the last mission of the original Homeworld, the Taiidan Emperor attacks mentally Karan S'jet knocking her unconscious. While the full extent of the injury he inflicts is unclear it is stated that emergency biotech teams have to work to keep her alive. Given how debilitating that attack proved it only makes sense that the Hiigarans made an effort to develop a defense against a similar attack when they built the Pride of Hiigara.
The NUN is our other major spacefaring faction. They aren't as strong technologically as the Kushan, but are also much more diverse. More importantly for our case, they're from a softer, super-robot style setting. As a result, they're more experienced with esoteric nonsense, have a diversity of species, and their small craft such as Variable Fighters, Destroids, and Zentradi Pods are superior pound-for-pound. Said small craft are also all areospace, filling an important niche in combat craft that can deploy from space but still fight planetside. They have an FTL drive that is easier to produce than the Kushan's, which may help. And are our source of cloning technology, which may be important. Space magic size changers are also there, and mean we can turn any human hero unit into a 30 foot Zentradi if we want... Also weaponized propaganda that somehow has actual magical effects, may prove to be an important wide-range anti-Chaos-corruption method.
I disagree with the notion that the New United Nations aren't as technologically advanced as the Kushan. In terms of sheer output and dimensional capabilities Macross technology can outstrip that of Homeworld easily and the range of Fold jumps rivals that of Homeworld Long Jumping. Homeworld's manual describes the Mothership's hyperdrive of having a max range of 2,500 light-years per jump and if we consider that to the be the range of a Far Jump then that is only two to three times the range of a long distance Fold jump.
OverTechnology is the product of Macross humanity's examinations of the crashed Alien Star Ship-1, a ship built using the technology of the Protoculture, who as their name implies, are Macross's precursor race. Their civilization which dates back to 500,000 BC was the one to create the Zentradi to act as their soldiers and laid the seeds for the various other humanoid species seen throughout mainline Macross. They created the technology the Zentradi wield and it is their technology that the New United Nations used to leapfrog their own by centuries if no millennia.
When it comes to their flavor of FTL drives, there is nothing to say that Macross Fold drives are any easier or harder to manufacture than hyperdrives – a Hiigaran battlecruiser which lacks dedicated production facilities can build on its own a hyperdrive if need be – and even if they were the fact that not every ship in a fleet that travels via hyperspace is required to have a hyperdrive installed offsets any difficulty of production. The major advantage of Fold drives over other methods of faster-than-light travel is its ability to be used within a gravity well. Jumping from a planet's surface is very much a possibility with Fold drives.
Additionally cloning technology isn't something only the New United Nations have. The Hiigarans, through the Taiidan, have access to cloning technology as well. The old Taiidan Empire used cloning technology to continue the Imperial line, which consisted of one man cloned over and over again. The Cabal of Destiny also have cloning technology.
Neither too are craft that operate both in space and atmosphere. Jumpships in Destiny are used by Guardians both in the void and on planets and those spacecraft used by the Cabal and Eliksni all dip and out of atmosphere with ease. Though it is never shown over the course of gameplay the end cutscene of Homeworld depicts strikecraft, corvettes, and a frigate landed on what is heavily implied to be a planet's surface. Homeworld 2 depicts in one of its early cutscenes a capital scale transport being loaded up with equipment as it hovers in place planetside.
You did miss a technology that is unique to the New United Nations and that is the EX-Gear. The EX-Gear is a powered exoskeleton that can be mounted with armor for personal combat, powered propulsion and wings for flight, and can be worn by pilots of variable fighters with the EX-Gear integrating into a vehicle's cockpit and doubling as an ejection system. The only other setting here that has powered exoskeletons is Destiny and theirs is more akin to traditional power armor and isn't anywhere as versatile.
Speaking of Destiny...
I'm not as familiar with Destiny, but it sounds like they'll provide our other magically adept faction, and other provider of elite forces. Ghosts and Guardians are still limited in number, but plentiful enough we can use them as elite squads instead of as lone Heroes. They're also intensely difficult to actually destroy, unless deployed against Chaos, but can't be replaced if they are. We'll probably want them on magical research and proliferation at least at first in order to get our own Light users built up. As a singular benefit, the Traveller will probably flyswat any Greater Daemons that try to poke around in our home system, giving us a safe zone.
Alongside the Guardians of the Last City, joining the Coalition are the Eliksni of House of Light and the forces of Empress Caiatl and with them comes a good amount of folk equipped to deal with the supernatural. The Eliksni of the House of Light are refugees of a post-scarcity civilization that lived in the shadow of the Traveler and have a far greater understanding of the supernatural to the point of being able to manipulate it with their technology. Caiatl's Cabal are less experienced but one of the species that that make up her forces are powerful natural psychics.
These guys are all pretty mean fighters themselves thanks to their biology, technology, or a mixture of the two. The Eliksni when properly nourished average 9 feet tall, growing even taller if fed an excess amount of Ether, and have access to infantry scale energy weapons, energy shields, cloaking devices and drones. The Cabal can get just as big as the Eliksni too while also being much beefier. They pack hard hitting projectile weapons and tons of explosives.
Whoa. Those are some big tanks.
That's not necessarily a good thing.
I once heard the ideal tank being described as being like Iron Man.
Small, so that it doesn't make a big target.
Highly mobile, to get into the most ideal firing position.
And packing lots and lots of firepower in as small a package so the ammo doesn't take up too much space.
Something like a Vanguard would have trouble turning corners and I have a feeling that it would wreck any roads it went upon.
Do we have access to the designs of the VF-31 Siegfried and the Sv-262Hs Draken III from Macross Delta ? I heard the Siegfried has railguns on its arms ?
Do you think we could build our own Rail Rifles at one point ?
That is true in so far as a battleship is easier to hit than a destroyer, however a larger vehicle is able to mount proportionally greater amounts of armor and carry proportional larger weapons. A weapon that would be devestating against a smaller destroyer would be of negligible impact against a more heavily armored battleship and that's even assuming a weapon one would wield against a smaller target could even be brought to bear against the larger vessel.
The general rule of thumb is that larger guns have greater effective range and any anti-tank weapon designed to be used against a regularly sized armored vehicle would most certainly be out-ranged by the naval grade guns of Kushan vehicles. Folks using those weapons wouldn't get the opportunity to use them.
Thinking in terms of tanks is also very much not how you're supposed to think of Kushan landships. The Vanguard is much closer to a naval vessel than it is a tank and dinging it for low maneuverability is the same as giving a nuclear carrier bad marks for not being able to make a three point turn. The expected terrain of Kushan land vehicles wasn't urban environments but rather endless sand dunes, hostile wide open spaces, where fitting in tight spaces is not a concern.
As a matter of fact, I can easily see Kushan vehicles exerting less ground pressure than modern vehicles and causing less damage to paved roads than a modern tank given they were designed to traverse sand dunes without sinking into them.
As an aside I would like to take this opportunity to issue another correction of a claim that I have made. In an earlier post I said that the LAV was capable of going 110 kilometers per hours. This was based on the in-game speed stat that is displayed when you select a unit and I assumed this number translated to kilometers per hour. It took me a shower to realize how absurd that assumption was considering the go to measure of distance in DoK is meters and having the measure of time be in hours was arbitrary and didn't make all that much sense from a game development perspective besides adding unnecessary complexity.
The more reasonable explanation, I realized, was that the speed wasn't kilometers per hour but likely meters per second. In order to test my hypothesis I went into Deserts of Kharak and decided to see how long it takes a unit to cross a set distance, in this case the length of a carrier. I selected a salvager with the speed stat of 75 and had it move in a straight line parallel to the carrier and took the time. The salvager crossed the 568 meter long carrier in seven to eight seconds. 568 divided by 75 is 7.57.
So, the speed stat looks to be meters per second. That means the LAV which has a listed speed of 110 does not go 110 kilometers per hour but 396 kilometers per hour. That also means the 111 meter long battlecruisers, with an ingame speed of 50, can go 180 kilometers per hour.
