It's a Gundam thread!

Based on a Japanese fan poll, Kira and Lacus placed 7th on the "Top 10 Anime/Manga Couples that fans want to Immediately Break Up".

And?

I knew you'd show up.

This is the Japanese poll.

I'd probably guess those who voted for them to break up consists of the following:

• The yaoi fangirls (esp. the Kira X Athrun fanbase)
• Those who support Kira x Fllay or Kira X Cagalli (although they ARE brother and sister)
• The otaku who are either obsessed with either Lacus or Rie Tanaka, and how their hearts are broken after Rie married Gyunei's VA

Watched more SEED. Namely, ep 22 (and through 25).

So, uh, why can't the Strike fly in Earth's atmosphere? It's got the Aile pack, doesn't it? And ISTR there not being any mobility issues back during Kira's duel with Waltfield...

The Aile Strike pack is a maneuverability pack, not a flight pack. It increases mobility and maneuverability. No one ever said it let the Strike actually fly.

It seems to me, like it ought to let it fly.

I mean... it's a jetpack with wings on it, scaled up to an MS.

@Judas Zala: You really have nothing better to do then to bitch about SEED and SEED Destiny, do you?

edited 3rd Jun '15 11:50:29 PM by heliosKAISER

At least I'm not like the Star Wars fanboys who bitch and moan about the Prequel Trilogy and how Lucas ruined their childhoods.

Yeah, see, SEED is one of those funny little shows where aerodynamics and thruster quantity actually matter.

As for artillery suits, they did last, but mostly on Zeon's side - see also, the Xamel and Zssa. The Federation appears to have decided that beam weapons were superior in most regards, and didn't compromise the structure and manoeuvrability of their suits so badly (and manoeuvrability was at a premium in the era of One-Hit Kill beam weapons). Their machines do still have bazookas similar in power to their early artillery suits' back-mounted guns, but they're never depicted as being all that effective compared to beam weapons. I imagine the armour of machines like the Big Zam and Psyco Gundam is just too thick for conventional weaponry to do meaningful damage before they shred you, and Minovsky interference plus their surprising agility means you can't just pick them off with BVR weaponry.

Speaking of, it would be pretty cool to see your characters' reaction to coming up against beam weapons for the first time. Those were about as revolutionary and terrifying an innovation as mobile suits.

edited 4th Jun '15 1:37:41 AM by Iaculus

Well, the problem with that is they're probably the ones who get to drop the toys, since they're Feddies. You're not really guaranteed to run into a Zeon beam weapon until A Bao A Qu, or maybe even Stardust Memory.

I also think you're underestimating the raw destructive power of the Guncannon series a bit. They're short-barreled so it's probably not firing kinetic penetrators, but a 280mm round? That's flat 11 inches! You're getting to the point where you don't actually need to penetrate a mobile suit's armor to mess it up real bad with regular HE, and even a relatively poorly designed HEAT round would penetrate twice its diameter in armor. (Plus it's so big you can multiple-charge it three or four times to beat spaced/slat/reactive armor.) The cannon is probably more destructive than the beam rifle against many targets; the beam just blasts straight through them.

edited 4th Jun '15 2:56:00 AM by Night

I'm talking about what we see in the shows. I have no doubt that bazookas are great against anything that doesn't have Applied Phlebotinum armour, but most stuff in the UC does from the late One Year War onwards, and we did actually see how conventional weaponry fared against the Big Zam - spoilers, not very well. It's a consistent thing that beam weapons usually offer much more bang in a smaller package. The temperatures they emit shouldn't be underestimated, either - they don't just punch holes in things like kinetic penetrators, they melt their way through. That's why they typically do much more damage than the size of the hole they make would indicate. Anything inside the suit that can be cooked off will be. Plus, the way their peculiar physics interacts with reactors means that the usually impossible nuclear-explosion meltdown is an actual thing that can and does happen.

On their availability, Doms had on-board mega-particle guns from day one (in other words, the mid-war), as did most aquatic suits. Hand-carried beam weapons only really showed up with the Gelgoog, but were swiftly adopted by all other Zeon machines. Even Zakus upgraded to beam machine guns. You could save that nasty surprise for the late war, or you could either have your folks fight a Dom, Acguy, or Z'gok (c'mon, tell me honestly that you don't want to give someone PTSD flashbacks of Acguys) or have to deal with a warship turret used as a fixed emplacement. Or, if you want absolute screaming horror, send them up against a prototype beam-equipped Gallop or Dabude.

edited 4th Jun '15 3:49:46 AM by Iaculus

Aile Strike is a bit iffy. There are many moments in the show where it does seem to be flying but not quite. I was watching Destiny and the Strike Rouge does straight up fly bit quite a bit of time has passed so whatever. Other suits like the Atlantic Federation's Windam had wings and propellers to let it fly but by Destiny's time, all 'Gundams' fly as they please.

Edit: Scratch that. The Gaia and the Abyss don't fly so who knows.

edited 4th Jun '15 4:06:41 AM by RangerJackWalker

Strike Rouge had the IWSP pack which enabled it to fly, Aile Strike just had jump jets that enabled it to glide and jump high.

Also, a correction. It looks like it was the Astrays that have wings with propellers.

So... did we ever see the GM Spartan in action?

Aile Strike has limited flight capability. Enough to get airborne for a bit to take out flying enemies, but not enough to keep it constantly airborne over the ocean.

By Destiny, this problem would be corrected, and they'd work out flightpacks for several other MS's.

Nuclear Gundam's can all fly, even if they really shouldn't, like Legend, which has two thrusters and is a circular brick of an MS that has no wings or anything looking remotely aerodynamic whatsoever.

Otherwise battery powered Gundam's vary by design.

So, having acquired an Altron Shenlong ver. Ka HG gunpla (yes, that's what I'm calling it, deal with it), I decided to go looking for Wufei quotes just for the hell of it, and I came across, uh, this.

I haven't watched Wing yet, so I dunno if it's a decent assessment or not, but I think it's interesting!

@Iaculus: Perhaps, but I am not responsible for the fact that the vineer of actually knowing what they were talking about with power outputs and weapon types and armor thicknesses was added ex post facto for MS Gundam; if I take them at their word in these then I cannot take the series at face value, or vice versa. (This is one of the reasons why, I think, mobile suits and even Gundams are depicted as much more fragile in series like War In The Pocket, 08th MS Team, and even the MS IGLOO set; the teams making them have a better grasp of just how incredibly powerful most of the weapons in the show actually are.)

The Dom's gun isn't suitable for engaging armor though; in fact it seems to lack the ability to even permanently damage an opposing unit's optics, something that Federation vulcans can do. It's probably not effective against tanks. And it probably doesn't need to be. The Dom is the point where the mobile suit really, truly surpasses the tank. Doms can get in among a tank unit in seconds compared to the several minutes it takes a Zaku or Gouf to accomplish the same thing in the open.

As for Zakus with beam machine guns, that's crazy talk. The whole point of the Gelgoog was that the Zaku frame had reached the end of its useful lifespan and could not be adapted for beam weapons reasonably.

Realistically though the experience of beam weapons is also less meaningful from the Federation side, because the majority of Federation units are unable to withstand the firepower of Zeon mobile suits already. A Type 61's armor might hold up against a single round from a Zaku (if that, depending on where it gets hit), but not a three-round or five-round burst into the same rough area. It is not going to repel a Dom's bazooka shot on its best day. You have to have a Luna Titanium-armored Federation mobile suit before the difference between a Zaku and a Z'Gok becomes apparent. (A Z'Gok might even scare you less; it has to directly hit you to kill you rather than taking your tracks off with blast effect or shrapnel, and it has a slower rate of fire.)

edited 4th Jun '15 8:33:50 PM by Night

That's actually a very interesting perspective on Wufei.

I think the problem with him in the show is that the biggest part of his characterization, the death of his wife, doesn't happen in-series and is never hinted at in the anime (beyond his nickname for his Gundam, which, from the context of the anime alone, is never explained). You pretty much have to read the Episode Zero manga to know any of that. So he comes off as extremely shallow with bizarre and offensive ideas about what he's doing.

Now, to be fair, I have heard that the Episode Zero stuff was going to be in the Wing anime, but due to budget cuts or something those episodes got turned into recap episodes instead.

Nope, anything can carry a beam gun with an on-board E-pack. It's why the Titans' Hizack exists - despite the remodel, it's mostly just a Zaku with improved engineering. The Gelgoog was far more ambitious - it was designed to be a Zeon Gundam, with Luna Titanium armour, a monstrous powerplant, and top-notch agility (it ended up being less durable, but only because it had thinner and less sensibly-shaped armour, not because of material issues). It only had beam weapons because beam weapons were the top of the line in mobile suit weaponry, not because it was the only machine that could use them. A Zaku could use a Gelgoog's rifle and naginata just fine, because they were specifically designed to have their own power supply.

I would also like to reiterate that beam weaponry is shown to have an explosive effect on impact. It's not a kinetic penetrator, it's a thermal weapon powerful enough to explosively vapourise rock. A near-miss from a beam will not only melt you via convection, but pelt you with superheated debris from whatever it did hit. And then it'll do the same to whatever was behind whatever it hit. Beams aren't just scary because they ignore armour, but because they ignore much more cover than even extremely powerful conventional weaponry, and are far more accurate. An Acguy may look silly, but it stops being so when its Dopp spotter picks you out and it snipes you right through the hill you were hiding behind. And then walks over and dumps a half-dozen missiles on your flaming wreckage for good measure.

edited 5th Jun '15 9:50:26 AM by Iaculus

That completely contradicts pretty much every other source which actually has something to say on the subject; c.f. the writeups for all the model kits, MSV, 08th MS Team directly (it was stated that the Gundam Ground Type and GM[G] had the reactors to handle a full-up beam rifle, a regular GM does not), among others.

It also contradicts the basic function of the E-Cap tech as it has been described many times. E-Caps store megaparticles; the suit they're fired from and its weapon still has to create a containment and acceleration field to fire them and give them accuracy. (Being able to tinker with this is where the F91/Victory-era VSBRs eventually come from.) The reason the GM had a beam spray gun was that its reactor couldn't power a full-length rifle that would give its shots greater cohesion. The GM Sniper, which was a sensors-only refit and a coat of green paint, had to hook into a Big Tray reactor to power a beam rifle (and a Big Tray cooling system to cool it). The Zaku didn't have the leftover reactor power to provide the power to a beam projectile weapon or even a beam melee weapon. Neither did the Dom and Rick Dom.

The Hizack is a complete Zaku rebuild, something that may well have been as or more expensive than an entirely new suit (c.f. rebuilding an aircraft from one model to another) and the real economy of the Hizack is the use of many existing parts for maintenance and the ability to tap into an existing pool of pilots who understand roughly the limitations and capabilities of the Zaku frame, either from having piloted it or fought it. (Probably also saves on development costs, relatively speaking.)

The Gelgoog does not have Luna Titanium armor, as established by pretty much every source that's ever addressed the issue. It's similar to or better than the Gundam in most other ways, but not that one.

As for beams having an explosive effect: when they hit a Minovsky reactor, yes, but MS Gundam is inconsistent about the matter otherwise and later series tend to be even less sure of this. Even if they do, they also have a (very significant) penetrative effect; if the detonation occurs under a meter of dirt, the blast will be far reduced compared to a heavy shell with an instant-action fuze, even if it's a shaped charge. And of course, they also have to generate their own shrapnel; something which penetrating a meter of dirt is really going to put a damper on. Making craters is anathema to casualty radius, and beams would be very good at making craters.

edited 5th Jun '15 8:15:08 PM by Night

Finished rewatching Destiny. Wasted potential is all I'm going to say towards the last quarter of the series. I love the first 3/4 of the series so yeah.

So I have begun writing my Gundam Fan fiction called Mobile Suit Mars. I am just on the prologue now.

Did you watch the HD version? It improves on it but not quite enough.

I watch dubbed almost exclusively so no.