It's a Gundam thread!

Man, Graham is just the hatiest of Hate Sinks for me. Guy's just a turd.

Speaking of the GM Cannon, the fact that its redesign for the manga is relatively minor might just indicate that its design is already perfect. Shame that it's always fucking P-Bandai. I'd love a GM Cannon kit.

The "when you hear jazz, it means I'm coming to get you" line might be the narmiest thing in any Gundam series, and that says a lot. But it leads to the excellent Mook Horror Show where, due to the Minovsky Particle interference, the Zaku's radios only pick up the jazz at extreme close range which... is just fucking perfection. Like, that's a perfect marriage of taking advantage of the setting and the character to create an amazing scene.

The TB Full Armor Gundam is overall pretty great. Hell, I even love the naked version, but obviously it's cooler with all its subarms and shields and missiles and murder. Excellent color scheme, too.

Thunderbolt is great. It's by far my favourite UC media and ranks pretty high even in the whole franchise.

I got the 1/100 Ver Ka Full Armor

The TB Full Armour is literally mecha Sundowner from Metal Gear Rising and I love it

I'M FUCKIN INVINCIBLE

I wonder how the author of Thunderbolt is doing, last I heard of him was that he had to make a change of artstyle due to an injury on his right hand.

Left hand, actually.

Oh, yeah. My mistake.

Yeah, I don't like the application of Red Shirt Army in the series. It's like when the Zaku pilot squares off against the GM squadron. The scenes with him establish his personality a little, reflect a bit on his backstory and give him a moment of dignity as he goes. The GM pilots all scream their heads off and we learn nothing about them. It's kind of like that throughout all of the series tbh. If a Fed soldier is important, they're in a Gundam, everyone else is a hi then die rando. While the Zaku pilots tend to get more play and character before they bite it because while their suits are diverse there's rarely something that makes them the special (baring Char).

In universe I can't really blame Graham though, asshole he may be. It wasn't his call to staff their ranks with kids, and they had to use everything they had.

Makes me appreciate Apolly, Conroy, and, to a lesser extent, Sleggar more. They help fill out the ranks with someone to give a shit about. Like the warrior women in Mad Max Fury Road. Give the heroes some rank and file, make their victory more than just the main character tearing up the bad guys. Bianca's addition in the TB sequel is good.

Also, apparently the creator of "Cool robot," you're missing the point, did a follow up.

I like how they say "boy did people run with that perceived pretense, they get really mean," because that's kind of what the meme devolved into. A lot of elitist "you're too dumb to see the deep meaning" kind of stupidity.

It's a good follow up.

Edited by DrPsyche on Apr 9th 2019 at 12:23:48 AM

I mean, my issue with Graham is less the young soldiers in his ranks and more the whole, you know, undermine his CO at every turn, openly insult her, then murder her for trying to save his life thing.

Narratively, what struck me as weirdest about TB is the value of Thunderbolt sector. The Federation are throwing a lot of resources at it. Dozens upon dozens of GMs, and a state-of-the-art Gundam that makes Amuro's look like garbage (although I assume it's redesigned in this continuity like almost everything else). And Zeon's defending it with... like, five Zakus and two Rick Doms? And pilots who are explicitly considered expendable at best.

I understand the We Have Reserves mindset but even so I can't really wrap my head on the dissonance between the two sides' apparent value on the sector.

Edited by Larkmarn on Apr 10th 2019 at 9:25:37 AM

It's a Zeon Supply line area, least amount of transit time last I checked which makes it fantastic for logistics. The Feds are trying to render the Zekes even more desperate, add in the danger of the Thunderbolt sector and the Zekes who've mapped it and had more time in it have a advantage.

It's not about strategic importance. It's about the Moore Brotherhood being headed by colonial aristocracy who are rich as balls and useful for propaganda purposes.

Which would make no sense. Because then it's valuable to Zeon. So you would think they would have a single able-bodied pilot there.

Is more plausible, but not really alluded to in December Sky (entirely possible it's in the manga). The Moore Brotherhood caring makes sense since they're from Side 4 and trying to reclaim their home, the Federation's backing of them is unexplained in the movie.

Yeah, and why did Zeon send all of those reinforcements at the end? They said they were leaving the Living Dead Division on their own to die, but then send a whole ton of top of the line Gelgoogs out to help them. I thought the line they dropped in the story "the fighting has spilt from one sector into another", would explain it. Like, the Zeon don't care about the LDD dying defending this area of space, but now that the fight's moved out of there it's now Zeon's problem, but the fight never leaves the Thunderbolt Sector and the Gelgoogs all end up deploying there anyway.

I kind of rationalize it with the Zeon telling the LDD to defend it as long as possible until they send reinforcements, not telling the LDD that because they just don't care about them anyway. And that they left the sector to the Feds because they needed all hands on deck for A Baoa Qu.

It is referenced in the story. Io and Claudia both got their positions through nepotism, which greatly shapes their personalities and the way other people react to them. As for the Zeon reinforcements, they're close to A Baoa Qu (which is the whole reason anyone outside the Brotherhood cares about the Thunderbolt Sector). It really wouldn't have been too hard for Fisher to run off and let a massive Zeon fleet know that one of their back-routes had been compromised - the area was only lightly guarded because nobody expected anyone sane to try attacking it.

Edited by Iaculus on Apr 10th 2019 at 11:23:42 AM

Was that in reference to me? Because that doesn't answer anything I said. The nepotism is referenced and is text, but the "Side 4 having resources to justify this" isn't.

Also, TB was a siege. They had been throwing waves of mooks for a while, then they took out the LD's leader and best suit. Then got a Gundam and started actually wrecking the LD. And we know this lasts for a while because here is where Karla goes of A Baoa Qu and gets a Zeon Cross. And at this point, their ace was in a Zaku I. And then the Feddie's got more reinforcements.

Maybe nobody expected anyone sane to be attacking it, but insane people were attacking it, Zeon knew, and did didn't send a single new unit or Big Gun.

Which is why it's so weird that they get support... at the very end of the movie. Even closer to the Battle of A Baoa Qu.

Edited by Larkmarn on Apr 11th 2019 at 12:23:48 PM

I assume that the LDD were screwed over by Zeon high command because as it was the final days of the One Year War, Zeon couldn't muster any spare Big Guns or Mobile Suits until it was too late. Considering the fact that Amuro was responsible for a number of Zeon losses somewhere else...

That and Zeon blew a shitton of supplies, materials and moneys on wild flights of fancy mobile suits, even outside of the OYW. Shit like the Apsalas projects, the Kampfer as a side project, the Zakrello, Garma's Newtype Monkey Army, Zeon basically rented out their own plot of land to install their own cemetery in.

Hey, the Kampfer was actually a good design.

The fact that Io and Claudia's nepotism worked is evidence of the Moore Brotherhood's wealth and influence. Colonial aristocracy getting to pilot a Gundam and command a fleet respectively suggests we're dealing with serious money - if they can buy those positions, they can probably buy anything else they want. As for the LDD, they didn't really need anything more than they had. They had a perfect fortress that was defendable by a skeleton crew, so that's what Zeon gave them. It was when the Federation was threatening to break through that they became a danger to the main Zeon fleet, so the main Zeon fleet decided to squash them.

A lot of the side projects were good ideas, just not followed out to completion. If they followed through with the Gouf, the Gyan, the Gelgoog, the Bigro, any of them to full mass-production rather than developing several dozen prototypes and having them eat each other's resources and development time, then they'd be fine. Honestly, if they never stopped producing Zaku IIs with the occasional Zaku II High Mobility Type for aces, they probably would have won the war.

Again, not really? The nepotism is what makes them high-ranking in the unit made up of their people; there's no hint that the reason the Moore Brotherhood exists because of Side 4's influence. Basically, they're influential in Side 4 Moore, therefore they're influential in the military unit made up of the Moore Brotherhood. This isn't a hint of Moore's influence, just their influence within Moore.

And yeah. It was perfectly defensible with a skeleton crew. Until it wasn't. After they had already taken severe losses and knew a Gundam was in the sector with enough time to pass that Karla was able to get a Zeon Cross and return, they still didn't see a single fortification.

Could just chalk it up to Zeon idiocy which... actually, yeah.

Edited by Larkmarn on Apr 11th 2019 at 4:25:25 AM

I assumed that Io got to his position precisely because of his skills and because everyone else who outranked him in Moore's MS Forces was already dead.

And Graham said something about turning them into martyrs, right?

And that Zeon Cross thing is implied to take place months before Darryl first saw Io shooting Hoover in the face.

Edited by G2BattleConvoy on Apr 11th 2019 at 9:27:20 AM

I tend to agree that the whole Thunderbolt setup doesn't actually make much sense, but I'm willing to overlook it (mostly) because it's a Necessary Weasel for the story they want to tell. The Living Dead unit only seems to have like half a dozen or so mobile suits, while the Moore Brotherhood goes through almost 50 (a full team of two dozen is almost wiped out in the first battle, they get replacements for those, and then they're almost entirely wiped out again). What I find particularly annoying about this is that it's not even necessary, it's just lazy writing.

Zeon MS teams come in threes while Federation teams come in fours — give the Living Dead an oversized team or two understaffed teams (so, four or five MS total) and the Moore Brotherhood two full teams (eight MS), and you still get the same basic setup of the Zeon forces being outnumbered and outgunned, but don't run into the issues of the EFF apparently sinking an enormous amount of resources into a backwater theater, or the fight being so ridiculously lopsided that Zeon has a K:D ratio of 10:1 or so.

But that would mean not making the Zeon pilots look like super awesome badasses and we can't have that.

Edited by Unlikelyauthor2 on Apr 11th 2019 at 8:50:08 AM

I only read the first volume of Thunderbolt but I loved how the Gundam was shown to be a boogeyman to the Zeon forces.

The thing is literally a lighting bolt armed to the teeth.

Just learned there's a recent Hello Kitty and Gundam crossover starting this year.