Okay,

Palladium Games decided to venture into the miniatures gaming business with someone they haven't identified yet. I'm moderately ambivalent about this project because of the simple fact that Harmony Gold and danged near every single licensee of the Robotech franchise (including Palladium) has consistently shot the franchise in the foot by not packaging it as a unified setting, instead breaking it up into 3 separate entities. This results in poor sales of the later 2 arcs (The Masters War/Southern Cross and New Generation/MOSPEADA). This doesn't even begin to touch on the fact that the RPG itself is riddled with misinformation as well as being unbalanced in ways that are completely and totally illogical (and this is not even in regards to the actual Palladium system).

Supposedly, this will come out as a big boxed set that will debut a line of 1/285th scale models. Why they picked that small, I haven't a clue. This, in my opinion, makes no sense whatsoever as they have already indicated that the vehicles/mecha will all be to scale. The mecha from the later 2 generations are 3/4s, 1/2 or even smaller compared to the 1st generation vehicles. Instead, I think they should have gone with a sliding scale so you can still have individual infantry units (Cyclones or straight leg/Tactical Corps) to have different types of games (ala the old Star Wars D6 Miniatures).

Anyway, I'm sure there will be a dearth of terrain types so when I finally get the cash to buy this game, I and many others will probably be looking around for Battletech-style terrain sheets as well as stuff like cardstock buildings.

I guess they want the mecha to be...in scale with humans for 28mm games? I can't see any reasoning there...

The one thing that springs to mind is that this is the same scale that is used in the BattleTech miniatures game.
Not sure if it means anything, but something to think on.

1/285th is standard micro armor scale. It was introduced in the 1960s to the U.S. armed forces, and was used both for vehicle recognition and for tactical simulations. If I remember properly, a micro armor tank held at arms length has the same apparent size as a real tank a mile away. I could be misremembering the range.

*EDIT* I think GHQ makes the microarmour tanks used by the military.

The scale kind of stuck around with wargamers.

NATO uses 1/300th scale for the same purposes.

The Auld Grump