Headscratchers / Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory

• Unit 02's vulnerable spot is its shield. Were the designers unclear on what shields are for?
  • GP-02A was designed first and foremost for nuclear strikes, in violation of the Antarctic Treaty. Active cooling on your heat shield is very sensible. It's debatable whether Gato pulled out because the damage to the shield was incapacitating the normal operation of his suit in any fashion or whether he wanted to preserve the suit's nuclear strike capability as fixing the shield would have been a tricky operation for the ragtag Delaz Fleet, which was using improvised suits, like the MS-21C Dra-C that's as close as you can get to an Ugly in Gundam.
• What happened to the Albion's original fighter pilots? South Burning ends up being put in charge of a group made up of his best test pilots and Monsha's group (who are flown in after GPO2 is stolen), but Pegasus-class ships are mobile suit carriers, and even in peacetime they would have some pilots and suits aboard.
  • It is likely the Federation got so complacent that all the pilots were waiting for the ship at the test area which would have been the next destination.
• The scene from the first episode of the GP02 being armed shows them loading a missile into its bazooka. When Gato uses the bazooka later on, it fires a giant white ball of plasma. Uh... what?
  • The warhead is detonated in the chamber, and the entire explosion is forced out the business end with magnetic fields(or, this being Universal Century, an I-field). This was actually theorized originally as a form of propulsion for nuclear rocket engines(so an inversion of Weaponized Exhaust). It’s also how the Yamato Cannon in Starcraft is supposed to work.

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