Star Blazers/Capt. Harlock setting.

[ParitySoul]

I'm debating the playability of a Star Blazers style game. Having the PC's either play Yamato style crew or a Harlock variation. It's a very grim sci-fi universe but with a strong undercurrent of hope. How playable would you think this is?

[Aroooo]

Should work pretty well. I recall other threads talking about a Star Blazers RPG. Some other quick links from a Google search came up with these:

http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Harbo...geoyamato.html
http://www.gamezoid.com/D6SciRPG/

Aroooo

[tgrandjean]

It's very workable. I've thought about it myself.
The only difficult or unworkable aspect is the overkill of the 'Wave Motion Gun'.
Honestly, in a sci-fi game you want to have at least some measure of parity with the enemy ships (or fleet of ships).

[Ron]

A Star Blazer campaign worth of the name should include a number of opportunities where the PCs may sacrifice their lives to allow the survival of their crew mates or even humanity. I would love to play such game, but the players should be aware of the risks and the mood of the TV series.

[Tech]

It's very workable. I've thought about it myself.
The only difficult or unworkable aspect is the overkill of the 'Wave Motion Gun'.
Honestly, in a sci-fi game you want to have at least some measure of parity with the enemy ships (or fleet of ships).

True but you have to admit - the Wave Motion Gun is pretty cool. As I recall, it took awhile for them to be able to use it after it fired. At one point after firing it, it left the ship completely without power for awhile if memory serves correct. That is not an enviable position to be in.

[proditor]

You could also set the timeframe as after the 1st Gamilon war and base everyone on one of the Patrol cruisers (Koningsberg class). That way you can have them doing the exploration thing, they aren't in something as heavily armed as an EDF Battleship, and they can still do things that other ships can't do to them being at the sharp end of the spear since they are the eyes of the fleet.

[Aroooo]

True but you have to admit - the Wave Motion Gun is pretty cool. As I recall, it took awhile for them to be able to use it after it fired. At one point after firing it, it left the ship completely without power for awhile if memory serves correct. That is not an enviable position to be in.

I picked up two of the DVD's at a con a while back. I'll have to watch them again, but there might have been some killer recoil involved too.

Aroooo

[proditor]

I picked up two of the DVD's at a con a while back. I'll have to watch them again, but there might have been some killer recoil involved too.

Aroooo

There was. At one point IIRC, the wave motion engine gets damaged so they turn the ship around, turn off the recoil compensators and then fire the gun. Zoom, off they go.

[Michael Hopcroft]

A Star Blazer campaign worth of the name should include a number of opportunities where the PCs may sacrifice their lives to allow the survival of their crew mates or even humanity. I would love to play such game, but the players should be aware of the risks and the mood of the TV series.

At a recent anime convention in Portland, noted animation and fandom scholar Dr. Antonia Levi told the panel she was speaking to why Leiji matusmoto chose the Yamato for the series that would become Star Blazers.

First of all, the ship is not the actual WWII battleship -- that rusted at the bottom of the sea decades before the series started. Rather, it was the SPIRIT of the Yamato that rose from the depths and became the basis of the heroes' ship. It all goes back to the way the Yamato sank in the first place; the ship, rather than being allowed to be taken by the Americans, sialed out one last time. The enlisted crew were evacuated, the officers tied themselves to the masts, and the ship was scuttled. To Western eyes this seems a vainglorious gesture that was typical of the Japanese military nearing the end of the war (this was the period when the kamikaze suicide attacks on the American navy were at their height) but to the Japanese this death-before-defeat attitude was perfectly natural and goes back to the very heart of Japan's religion and culture.

Matsumoto was playing on the japnese belief that self-sacrifice for the good of the whole was a noble ideal. The mission of the Space Cruiser Yamato was so desperate and quixotic that it was almost a suicide mission, yet with the Earth in danger there was no shortage of volunteers.

I have been trying to find the uncut, original=langauage series for years.

[Ron]

I didn't knew that, but it makes perfect sense. I always thought that self sacrifice was the true spirit of the series, whereas was really strange to use the original Yamato hull.

[proditor]

That's a pretty liberal take on the Yamato's last mission from what I've read however. Yes, she was to be sacrificed, but she was supposed to beach herself and become an emplaced battery off of Okinawa. IIRC, the dive information form the Yamato shows she was not sunk by scuttling BTW, it was the 10 torpedoes and 23 aerial bombs that forced a roll followed by a massive explosion that sent her to the bottom and left only 300 out of 2,798 as survivors. I'm not a fan of nationalistic revisionist history (including our own). Yamato was sunk, Bismark was sunk. Scuttling didn't even factor into the equation.

All of which has nothing to do with the bravery of the men who embarked on what they KNEW was a one way mission (They were not given enough fuel to return).

The reason the original language version is so hard to find is because when they show the history of the namesake ship, they show American dive bombers peeling off and destroying men and material in a graphic (for the time) attack. Later when the Gamilons make their first bombing run on the new Yamato, they use the exact same flight/dive pattern, follow the same course. It was felt this might honk off Americans, so it was cut and the nameof the ship changed to the Argo.

[Vondy]

At a recent anime convention in Portland, noted animation and fandom scholar Dr. Antonia Levi told the panel she was speaking to why Leiji matusmoto chose the Yamato for the series that would become Star Blazers.

First of all, the ship is not the actual WWII battleship -- that rusted at the bottom of the sea decades before the series started. Rather, it was the SPIRIT of the Yamato that rose from the depths and became the basis of the heroes' ship. It all goes back to the way the Yamato sank in the first place; the ship, rather than being allowed to be taken by the Americans, sialed out one last time. The enlisted crew were evacuated, the officers tied themselves to the masts, and the ship was scuttled. To Western eyes this seems a vainglorious gesture that was typical of the Japanese military nearing the end of the war (this was the period when the kamikaze suicide attacks on the American navy were at their height) but to the Japanese this death-before-defeat attitude was perfectly natural and goes back to the very heart of Japan's religion and culture.

Matsumoto was playing on the japnese belief that self-sacrifice for the good of the whole was a noble ideal. The mission of the Space Cruiser Yamato was so desperate and quixotic that it was almost a suicide mission, yet with the Earth in danger there was no shortage of volunteers.

I have been trying to find the uncut, original=langauage series for years.

I declare Nerd Doctor Shenanigans!

The ship:

DEPARTMENT OF THE NAVY -- NAVAL HISTORICAL CENTER
805 KIDDER BREESE SE -- WASHINGTON NAVY YARD
WASHINGTON DC 20374-5060
Online Library of Selected Images:
-- JAPANESE NAVY SHIPS --
Yamato (Battleship, 1941-1945)

Yamato, lead ship of a class of two 65,000-ton (over 72,800-tons at full load) battleships, was built at Kure, Japan. She and her sister, Musashi were by far the largest battleships ever built, even exceeding in size and gun caliber (though not in weight of broadside) the U.S. Navy's abortive Montana class. Their nine 460mm (18.1-inch) main battery guns, which fired 1460kg (3200 pound) armor piercing shells, were the largest battleship guns ever to go to sea, and the two ships' scale of armor protection was also unsurpassed.

Commissioned in December 1941, just over a week after the start of the Pacific war, Yamato served as flagship of Combined Fleet commander Isoroku Yamamoto during the critical battles of 1942. During the following year, she spent most of her time at Truk, as part of a mobile naval force defending Japan's Centeral Pacific bases. Torpedoed by USS Skate (SS-305) in December 1943, Yamato was under repair until April 1944, during which time her anti-aircraft battery was considerably increased. She then took part in the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June and the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October. During the latter action, she was attacked several times by U.S. Navy aircraft, and fired her big guns in an engagement with U.S. escort carriers and destroyers off the island of Samar.

Yamato received comparatively light damage during the Leyte Gulf battle, and was sent home in November 1944. Fitted with additional anti-aircraft machine guns, she was based in Japan during the winter of 1944-45. Attacked by U.S. Navy carrier planes in March 1945, during raids on the Japanese home islands, she was again only lightly damaged. The following month, she was assigned to take part in the suicidal "Ten-Go" Operation, a combined air and sea effort to destroy American naval forces supporting the invasion of Okinawa. On 7 April 1945, while still some 200 miles north of Okinawa, Yamato was attacked by a massive force of U.S. carrier planes and sunk.

After the war, the great battleship became an object of intense fascination in Japan, as well as in foreign countries. Yamato's remains were located and examined in 1985 and again examined, more precisely, in 1999. She lies in two main parts in some 1000 feet of water. Her bow portion, severed from the rest of the ship in the vicinity of the second main battery turret, is upright. The midships and stern section is upside down nearby, with a large hole in the lower starboard side close to the after magazines.

The mission:

DEPARTMENT OF THE NAVY -- NAVAL HISTORICAL CENTER
805 KIDDER BREESE SE -- WASHINGTON NAVY YARD
WASHINGTON DC 20374-5060
Online Library of Selected Images:
-- JAPANESE NAVY SHIPS --
Yamato (Battleship, 1941-1945) --
in the "Ten-Go" Operation, 6-7 April 1945

Soon after Okinawa was invaded on 1 April 1945, the Japanese implemented a desperate effort to destroy the fleet supporting the landings. Designated "Ten-Go", this operation largely consisted of massed "Kamikaze" suicide plane attacks. However, the battleship Yamato, largest surviving ship of the Japanese Navy, was also to play a role, steaming down from the home islands to blast invasion shipping off Okinawa's western coast. This mission was also understood to be suicidal, and only enough fuel was provided for a one-way cruise.

Yamato and her consorts, including the light cruiser Yahagi and eight destroyers, left port in mid-afternoon on 6 April 1945, the day that the "Ten-Go" suicide planes began their all-too-horrible onslaught. While exiting the Inland Sea, the ships were twice sighted by U.S. submarines, and were again seen by a carrier search plane in the morning of the 7th. U.S. Navy carriers launched nearly 400 aircraft to hit the oncoming Japanese ships. Six U.S. battleships prepared to intercept the Japanese, in case they somehow got past the overwhelming aerial force. The Yamato group was provided with no air support, so the U.S. planes were opposed only by generally ineffective anti-aircraft gun fire.

The carrier planes began their attacks in the early afternoon, scoring immediate bomb and torpedo hits on Yamato and sinking Yahagi and a destroyer. Three other destroyers were sunk over the next hour, as the Japanese continued to steam southwards. In all, Yamato was struck by some ten torpedoes, mainly on the port side, and several bombs. At about 1420 on the afternoon of 7 April, less than two hours after she was first hit, the great battleship capsized to port, exploded and sank, leaving behind a towering "mushroom" cloud. Fewer than 300 men of Yamato's crew were rescued. Nearly 2500 of her men were lost, plus over a thousand more from Yahagi and the escorting destroyers. U.S. losses totalled ten aircraft and twelve aircrewmen.

[Major Tom]

There was. At one point IIRC, the wave motion engine gets damaged so they turn the ship around, turn off the recoil compensators and then fire the gun. Zoom, off they go.

I remember the episode where the WMG was fired for the first time, when the
Argo was in orbit over Jupiter and they needed to deal with the Gamilon
"floating continent" base. Not only did the blast destroy the base, but the re-
coil from the WMG knocked the ship backwards and down into Jupiter's atmo-
sphere.

Now that was some serious Grade-A bang-bang.

Major Tom

[Michael Hopcroft]

Matsumoto was also responsible for Galaxy Express 999, a popular space fantasy about a train that travels between the stars and a war between robots and humans. Of course, the show was also about a young boy dealing with his first major crush on the gorgeous, mysterious Matael, who is one of anime's iconic beauties.

Apparently people either like these settings or they don't. I have an anime expert friend who can't stand Matsumoto. But I love his work. Go figure.

(And with that I reach my 600th post)

[sls1969]

I think you could do a viable game setting after the Gamilon war..i.e. after the Yamato/Argo returns with the cure for the Earth. Have it set right before the Comet Empire invasion since at this point Earth has a number of other ships that you could put the party on. That way you could leave the Yamato/Argo alone and have it as an awesome NPC. With the GM controlling the Wave Motion Gun you don't have to worry about the party wanting to go and use it against every enemy you come across.

It would be like letting Ewoks controlling the Death Stars' main planet killing weapon....