First Robotech War

In the fictional world of Robotech, the First Robotech War (February 2009-April 2011) was a conflict between the earth-based Robotech Defense Force and the alien Zentraedi. Though it ended with the Earth Forces victorious, that victory was won at a terrible cost, with much of the Earth's surface and population devastated.

Roots
The First Robotech War's roots were laid in 1999 when an alien spaceship crash landed on the fictional Macross Island in the South Pacific, causing a ceasefire in a global war. Given teeth by the secret discovery of giant alien people, the United Earth Government acted quickly to unify the warring factions and rebuild the spacecraft. The rebuilt ship was given the designation SDF-1. Unknown to mankind at the time, the Zentraedi have been searching for the ship.

The War
The war began on the day of the scheduled launch of the SDF-1 in February 2009 (during the early summer in the Southern Hemisphere location of Macross Island) when a large Zentraedi armada led by Commander Breetai arrived in the solar system seeking the ship. Upon detection, the SDF-1 began an automatic firing sequence that the crew could not stop that fired on two Zentraedi scout ships. Unfortunately, that accomplished little except to confirm the ship's location on the planet and the Zentraedi began an assault in order to recover the battlefortress. An attempted follow up strike by two ARMD class carriers of the Orbital Fleet failed miserably against an enemy with superior both in forces and in experience in space combat. The SDF-1 managed to lift off amidst an urban battle between the Robotech Defense Forces and the Zentraedi in the streets of Macross City. To attempt to evade the enemy, the SDF-1's commander, Captain Henry J. Gloval ordered a space fold maneuver. However, as the fold system was never used before and the crew's training was entirely theoreticial with a still largely unknown system, they were not aware of how to use it inside a planet's gravity field, let alone at their relatively low altitude above Macross Island. The result was a botched jump that caught Macross Island along with the fortress, and overshot their intended destination of the dark side of the moon to materialize near the planet Pluto's orbit instead. Rebuilding Macross City inside the fortress and relocating the city's 70,000 inhabitants onboard, the SDF-1 began the long voyage to Earth.

During the ship's one year journey the Zentraedi attacked constantly, damaging the ship and depleting both its defensive forces and civilian population. For the Zentraedi's part, the enemy was a maddeningly unpredictable foe; the initial engagement had them seemingly able to accurately fire the ship's reflex cannons to simultaneously destroy two ships as a first strike, but their follow up attack suggested that they had no idea how to competently wage war in space. However, the Terrans suddenly surprised them by pulling off a supposedly impossible extreme low-altitude space fold jump with the SDF-1 to outmaneuver them. Given that their orders were to capture the ship intact at all costs, that kind of opposition proved most frustrating.

Two battles took place during the long trip to Earth, that are worth notice: the battle of Saturn´s Rings, during which the SDF-1 counterattacked the Zentraedi completely destroying an enemy strike force, and the Battle of Mars Base Sara, where the SDF-1 evaded a Zentraedi trap led by Khyron the Backstabber (commander of a Zentraedi reinforcement fleet requested by Breetai) during an attempt to resupply at the abandoned Martian outpost. As the crew had to self-destruct the base to free the SDF-1 to escape, the Zentraedi concluded that threatening Earth for the surrender of the ship would be a futile act against a foe seemingly ready to sacrifice their territory and holdings to keep it. For his failure to capture the fortress, Commander Breetai was relieved and replaced by the female Commander Azonia. She was no more successful in capturing the ship and in fact had to spend more of her efforts reining in Khyron who became increasingly obsessed with destroying the Micronian ship regardless of his orders.

Eventually the SDF-1 returned to Earth and Captain Gloval requested the United Earth Government to disembark the surviving 56,000 civilians from onboard the fortress. The government and the military, led by Admiral Hayes (father of the SDF-1's executive officer Lisa Hayes), refused the request, since they had declared that Macross Island and Macross City were destroyed in an attack by guerrillas after the departure of the SDF-1 to cover-up the war against the aliens. Furthermore, they refused to accept the reports of the overwhelming numerical superiority of the aliens and rationalized the eyewitness accounts as enemy deceptions to demoralize them. They even planned to cow the enemy with a decisive blow from their massive great cannon (later named Grand Cannon) which they were convinced was of greater firepower than what the Zentraedi possessed, despite knowledgeable warnings that was most definitely not the case. Captain Gloval defied the orders and began a series of low-altitude flights over populated areas to discredit the official story and force the government to accept the civilians. When a battle with the Zentraedi caused the destruction of a city in the Ontario Quadrant, a previous offer by the Ontario government to grant asylum to the civilians was withdrawn, and the United Earth Government banished the SDF-1 from Earth.

In the meantime, the Zentraedi began to be affected by Earth's culture, an irresistible force for a race bred solely for war. This contamination caused mass dissent amongst the Zentraedi ranks, which proved to be SDF-1's salvation in its darkest hours of the war. The first such occurrence happend when Breetai(reinstated after Azonia's own failure to succeed and in command of the elite Zentraedi Imperial fleet of over one million warships) and Exedore developed a plan to lure the SDF-1 into using the Daedalus Maneuver on a decoy Zentradi ship. Once the bow of the Daedalus opened inside the Zentradi ship, an ambush party led by Khyron attacked and destroyed the Destroids before they could open fire. The ambush party then entered the SDF-1 through the Daedelaus and wreaked havok throughout Macross City.

While the ship's forces desperately fought to stop the attack, the cultural contamination came into play. As the ambush party was proceeding, Khyron overheard conversation by his troops about finding "Minmei," the Micronian singer that secretly captivated many in the fleet. When the commander asked what they were referring to, the answer revealed the contamination. At this, Khyron went berserk and began to attack and chase his own troops throughout the ship's city area. This activity threw Breetai's boarding operation into total chaos, which allowed the Micronians to drive out the invaders, but Macross City suffered massive damage as a result of the attack. However, there was some consolation that the ship's structure and defences were left intact. Furthermore, the ship's crew found a small number of micronized Zentraedi who were defecting to them and they supplied invaluable insight about the enemy such as the startling fact that the genetic structure of both species was virtually identical.

The second occurrence of cultural contamination was when the Zentraedi's top pilot, Milia Fallyna, who had insisted on infilitrating the ship with a secret agenda to kill her Micronian counterpart, Maximilian Jenius, had instead fallen into love with him and agreed to marry him immediately. Captain Gloval agreed to this and organized a grand wedding ceremony not only to further influence the enemy certain to be observing this, but also to rally his crew and passengers to strive for a peaceful settlement of the war. However, the reports of cultural contamination of the Imperial Fleet prompted Zentraedi Supreme Commander Dolza to cut his losses and risk the wrath of the Robotech Masters by ordering an all out attack on the SDF-1 to destroy it with all hands.

However, that same contamination saved the ship when Myria insisted on joining her husband into battle and convinced him to strike a special target on the battlepods that left it crippled, but otherwise intact with its life support system functional. Commander Rick Hunter realized what his wingman was doing and joined in this merciful gesture along with many of his comrades as a means to face certain defeat with an honorable attempt to encourage peace. This proved more valuable than they realized as many Zentraedi, already growing attached to micronian culture, saw this activity as the last straw and began to mutiny throughout the fleet. Horrified at the unthinkable insubordination and social breakdown that contact with the Micronians was causing, Commander Breetai called off the attack in defiance of Dolza's orders and sought a truce with the SDF-1.

When Breetai's approached the SDF-1, there was some initial mistrust severe enough to have the Micronian's newly repaired main gun on a hair trigger. Again, Khyron nearly ruined the incident by launching an unauthorized attack on the ship that almost provoked the Micronians to fire. Only when Breetai had the fighter group destroyed were they convinced that the peace offering was serious. As Exedore parlayed with the SDF-1 crew, Dolza assembled the Grand Fleet to eradicate Humanity and the corrupted Zentraedi. When Exedore was informed of this development, he immediately advised the Micronian ship to flee the solar system, which the loyal humans rejected out of hand. As Gloval's ship and the dissident Zentraedi led by Breetai and Azonia prepared for battle, Khyron fled against the seemingly impossible odds. Almost five million Zentraedi warships folded to Earth in response to Dolza's orders.

The main Fleet began a massive planetary bombardment of Earth, eradicating almost every large population center and devastating most of the planetary surface. (The area devastated was "95% of the Earth's surface" according to the series narrator. The supreme commander of the planet's forces later said there were "70,000 survivors of the Zentraedi holocaust.") The Earth forces counterattacked with the massive Grand Cannon superweapon, obliterating many Zentraedi ships. Following this attack, the SDF-1 and the allied Zentraedi Imperial Fleet launched an attack of their own, using the music of Lynn Minmei to confuse the forces of the Grand Fleet, then blasted their way into Dolza's massive flagship. Dolza and his fleet were utterly destroyed. This signaled the end of the First Robotech War.

The Aftermath
The SDF-1 landed on Earth, and New Macross City was founded around the battered ship. For the next two years humans and Zentraedi worked together to rebuild the planet. The Robotech Defense Force, led now by Admiral Gloval, established itself as the planet's primary military force, leading the recovery efforts. Breetai took command of the remaining Zentraedi forces, now loyal to Earth. Unfortunately, a significant portion of the Zentraedi could not overcome their lifetime's conditioning as warriors and grew dissatisfied with civilian life while lusting for war. They indulged this longing by causing a series of violent incidents that would be called the Malcontent Uprisings. Commanders Khyron and Azonia were particularly active by leading a rebel Zentraedi movement against the RDF, staging several terrorist attacks including the theft of a resizing chamber in New Detroit and a protoculture power source in New Macross City. Eventually, Khyron and Azonia repaired a downed Zentraedi warship and used it on 1 January 2014 to ram and destroy the SDF-1 and the newly-built SDF-2, killing Admiral Gloval and forcing the evacuation of New Macross City. The now leaderless rebel Zentraedi continued to harass throughout the rest of the 2010s, but since they had no means of producing new war materials beyond what they could salvage, their defeat was simply a matter of time.

The most notable effect on the Earth in the aftermath of the First Robotech War was the devastation of its surface and the decimation of its population. The population of the Earth was reduced from six billion in 2009 to a listed 70,000 survivors in the immediate aftermath of the Zentraedi orbital bombardment in 2011. Fortunately, SDF-1 survived and landed with its population of Macross City inside, with the support of Breetai's fleet, provided a basis of a fully equipped technological civilization to restore order to the planet. Ironically, High command had exiled the ship to destroy it as part of their attack on the Zentaradi, but in doing so, they inadvertently spared the last major human city from destruction by the bombardment. The end of the First Robotech War led to the first and by far the longest period of peace of the Robotech Wars era, lasting almost 18 years from Dolza's defeat in 2011 to the invasion of the Robotech Masters in 2029.

Not all of the aftereffects of the war were bad, however. The sudden introduction of starships, protoculture and super-advanced Robotechnology to Earth led to a renaissance of sorts, as humanity strove to build a space fleet to take the war to the alien enemy. In addition, it was found that the planet's ecosystem was recovering faster and with more vigor than the scientific community anticipated. Unfortunately, the determination that the next phase of the war would be fought away from the Earth left the home planet vulnerable when the Robotech Masters appeared in 2030 and began the Second Robotech War (2029-30). The devastation of the Army of the Southern Cross led to the Earth's fall to the Invid in 2031, and the planet would remain occupied through three disastrous liberation attempts until the REF forced the Invid to retreat in the Third Robotech War (2031-44).

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