It's a Gundam thread!

Depends on the design of the reactor, but in UC, the answer is "an i-field". That's why hitting a reactor with a beam weapon causes a nuclear explosion. Hitting the i-field with the mega particles of a beam blast (or the i-field of a beam saber) causes the reactor's i-field to compress, which intensifies the fusion reaction it's containing, which causes it to go boom. Merely destroying the reactor with physical damage causes the i-field to dissipate, releasing the plasma and destroying the mecha, but not causing a massive explosion.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

I see. Thanks.

New question: Forgive me for asking a similar question I asked a long time ago, but if they wanted a mobile suit for long-ranged artillery purposes, why couldn't they have just reconfigured GM cannons to do both what the Guntank and Guncannon did?

The GM Cannon in Zeta did just that and out preformed the Guncannon in every possible way.

The Guntank did get some development into the Guntank II and the transformable Guntank R-44 in F91 but maneuverability sucked ass.

edited 27th May '16 8:34:03 AM by Memers

And aside from out-of-universe model kit reasons, why bother mass-producing Guntanks and Guncannons then if GM Cannons can do what the former two can do? Likewise with having a Sniper variant for G Ms that more o less should do the same thing as Guntanks, Guncannons, and GM Cannons?

Different makers and time periods.

Guncannons really did not exist past the OYW, the GM Cannon was developed from the Guncannon and did it's job and those did not enter service till 0083 ish. there is even a prototype GM cannon that is pretty much the base Guncannon with the GM's beam spray gun.

Guntanks were really a tank treds vs walking type thing, they really didn't exist outside of the Guntank II which briefly made an appearance in Zeta and Unicorn. F91 was years later and the R44 was literally a Guncannon + Guntank combined via transformation modes [1]◊.

edited 27th May '16 8:58:55 AM by Memers

But weren't there mass-produced Guntanks in 08th MS Team and mass-produced Guncannons in 0080?

Also, what about the GM Snipers?

Both of those were worse than the original the feds lacked the original parts and mass produced cheaper ones like the original GM, they also didn't exist past the OYW like I said. The GM cannon and the Guntank II replaced those.

And what is up with the Sniper? Its not very comparable, its like a sniper rifle vs a mortar in the real world.

edited 27th May '16 9:05:12 AM by Memers

The Guntanks in 08th MS Team were presumably like the Gundams in 08th MS Team — not so much mass produced as cobbled together out of all the spare parts leftover from the R&D project that ultimately created the machines that ended up on the White Base. 08th MS Team also uses its Guntanks as basically self-propelled artillery pieces, which makes one wonder why they bothered. Just use actual self-propelled guns instead, you know? I guess we can write it off as an experiment to see what worked and what didn't in the "mobile suit" space. A tracked vehicle is more stable than a legged vehicle, allowing it to be heavier (more armor, more ammo) and carry bigger guns without having to worry about tipping over. The mobility penalty of tracks-vs-legs doesn't seem to be worth it, though.

I don't think the Guncannons in 0080 are mass-produced either. We only see two of them, alongside the GM Snipers that form the Scarlet Team based out of the Grey Phantom (a Pegasus-class like the White Base). Like every other mecha in 0080 (save the Alex and Kampfer), they're "officially" a new never-seen-before-or-again variant of an existing design, but to be frank I don't buy it. It makes way more sense if they're just the same mecha, only animated differently. It seems way more reasonable to me that the Federation had a pair of Guncannons kicking around somewhere that they gave to a Pegasus crew than the idea that they developed and produced a cut-down version of the Guncannon, produced just a few models, and sent those out into the field instead.

(And since I'm contractually obligated to mention it every time 0080 comes up, the Kampfer fight was bullshit. The Scarlet Team just sits there and lets the Kampfer slaughter them. They don't dodge the Kampfer's attacks, they don't return fire, they barely move the entire fight — my personal headcanon is that the suits were launched empty on autopilot because the crew was out on the town getting drunk on Christmas.)

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

My point exactly.

Given that its a mobile suit wielding a sniper rifle, wouldn't that be good for artillery purposes?

edited 27th May '16 10:04:35 AM by HallowHawk

Artillery and snipers aren't really interchangeable, though when we're talking about mobile suits, the lines start to blur. Generally speaking, artillery is useful for destroying fixed defensive positions and armored vehicles as well as infantry, while snipers are capable of taking out infantry and light vehicles, but nothing that's armored. When we're talking about mobile suit sized stuff, though, everything is armored. I guess artillery-style mecha would be more useful for taking down ships and mobile armors, while snipers would have a tough time killing anything bigger than a mobile suit? (Even with beam weapons, taking out a ship or a mobile armor seems to be easier with explosives, given that they have a wider damage area and thus are more likely to hit something vital when compared to just drilling a hole through your target with a beam shot.)

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

I thought that the auto pilot thing WAS canon.

OH and David Hayter as Bernie is the second best thing for dub choices. The first being Sam and Matt as Athrun and Kira.

You gotta start somewhere.

That was the first time Hayter had to infiltrate a military base to take out a new mecha WMD.

A Sniper Rifle isn't remotely for artillery purposes, it is for precision strikes from a distance.

Artillery is good for wide spread destruction but the shells are slow and thus dodgable from a distance, that is why the Guncannon caries a rifle.

The Guntank and Guncannon were earlier iterations of the V-Project. It makes sense that they'd be mass-produced first - they're much simpler and lower-tech designs than the Gundam. On the merits of beams versus solid-shot artillery, a mega-particle gun is a highly accurate weapon that can cut through anything, while a bazooka is a weapon with a much larger blast radius that allows for a more diverse payload, doesn't hog the power supply, and won't cause a nuclear explosion if it hits a Minovsky reactor. One's good for precise anti-armour work, the other's good for wide-area suppression and extended combat. Of course, as the Universal Century progressed and mega-particle weaponry grew larger, more efficient, and and faster-firing, the advantages of conventional weaponry were greatly eroded.

What's precedent ever done for us?

Concerning why the Guncannon was used instead of switching over to the GM Cannon straight away: it's because the Feds had trouble cobbling together an artillery GM variant that didn't suffer mobility issues, stability issues, and/or damaged its own frame from the cannon's recoil. Switching the kinetic cannon for a beam cannon was the big breakthrough.

Concerning fusion containment breach: while a fusion reaction by itself isn't radioactive, it's not 100% clean either. Most fusion reactions produce loose neutrons that neutron-activate the containment vessel's inner wall (or whatever else that happens to be in the way), so some residual radiation will still be left.

If that be the case, then how in Universal Century's case aren't mobile suit pilots irradiated like the survivors of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki atomic bombings and those on the Daigo Fukuryu Maru during the Castle Bravo tests?

"the reactor's inner wall," he said.

Meaning, it doesn't actually/necessarily leak out into the cockpit/the rest of the MS.

It just seems like smart engineering to make sure your reactor (nuclear or fusion) is properly housed before you install it in something.

Indeed. The neutrons themselves aren't the problem (though neutron radiation can still kill you); whatever atom the neutron hits suddenly finds its nucleus being one neutron's worth of weight heavier, with the resulting isotope may or may not being an unstable one that promptly decays into something more stable. That decay is where the radiation comes from.

One RL fusion reactor design was basically using loose neutron to convert Lithium into pure 1-Hydrogen. Just a small trivia from RL.

UC reactors supposedly use a deuterium + helium-3 reaction, which produces helium-4 (ie, normal helium) and a proton. Since there are no free neutrons, that means it can be contained with an electromagnetic field — using an i-field instead (basically an electromagnetic field seeded with Minovsky particles) apparently just makes it more energy-efficient, allowing the reactors to be miniaturized for use in vehicles.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Uh, was there a material book that had all this Gundam science?

There's no one singular collected source, and most of it's in Japanese anyway. Most of it is just stuff I've picked up in bits and pieces over the years. The best specific source I can come up with for the deuterium+ helium-3 thing is this article from Mark Simmons' (a Big Name Fan who does translation work for Bandai and Sunrise — his name is in the credits of most English-released Gundam shows) website, which mentions that Minovsky reactors are "fueled by isotopes of hydrogen and helium" (that would be deuterium and he-3, respectively). Helium-3 is mentioned explicitly in either MSG or Zeta — it's collected from Jupiter and hauled back to Earth by the Jupiter Energy Fleet, which Scirocco is part of before he decides that conquering Earth is more his style. (Deuterium can be found in reasonable quantities on Earth — it's not a particularly rare isotope.)

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

D-He3 fusion is indeed a thing in real life fusion research, specifically because of its aneutronic nature. However, it's not completely aneutronic because there's no way to prevent D-D fusion taking place at the same time, which is not aneutronic.