It's a Gundam thread!

Both have a cute girl robot tho.

Aside from the obvious lack of international and very destructive fight tournament, but swapped out with lore that wouldn't be too out of place in Stargate or Halo.

Ah, yeah, that's true.

The sports tournament is GBO. Re:Rise just fast-forwards to the bit where the protagonists get dragged away from their game to save the world from a broken, genocidal planetary caretaker AI and its Brainwashed and Crazy human puppet.

Questions to the fans more experienced than me: other than in Fighter G Gundam, are there any other Gundams that have vulcan guns implanted in their heads? Is it a common thing in the franchise or is it a thing exclusive in Fighter G?

It’s actually a feature dating back to the original series and it’s been a staple ever since.

Yeah, head vulcans are very much a staple part of the classic Gundam loadout.

It's actually so common in Gundam units across the franchise, it's a notable mention when a Gundam doesn't have head vulcans.

Off the top of my head, I can only think of the Gundam Mk II from Zeta, and the Gundam frames from IBO. Although the Mk II had a vulcan, it was a separate piece of head mounted equipment that would be jettisoned after running out of ammo. In the case of IBO, at least a couple of the Gundam frames had launchers in their head that were used to deploy signal flares instead of weapons. Which actually might make sense, because beam weapons were shown to cause ammo to cook off and explode.

The other part of it is that the Calamity War Gundams were primarily designed to engage nanolaminate-armoured targets. Antipersonnel weaponry was useless since the enemy they were engaging didn't have personnel in the conventional sense. The lightest ranged weapons we see from that era are 120mm assault rifles, which are at least beefy enough to mow down Plumas.

The Gundam's head vulcans are so iconic that they're a mecha cliche in Japanese media. I've seen other series that have explicitly pointed out how "Gundam-like" a mecha is just because it has machine guns in its head.

Edited by DarkHunter on Apr 22nd 2021 at 7:50:31 AM

Wait, now that I think about it, I think I heard that Bael actually had some kind of small automatic rail guns mounted on its wing binders, but for whatever reason they're fixed pointing up, so it could only shoot at stuff it was flying directly towards. It stuck on my head because of how silly that sounded.

Also, I could have sworn I heard somewhere that the Mobile Armors didn't originally have Nano Laminate at the beginning of the Calamity War, they copied it from the Mobile Suits. Or, was that just fan speculation?

Edited by Unlikelyauthor2 on Apr 22nd 2021 at 9:20:55 AM

The Bael's wing coilguns serve the same purpose as another suit's rifle, or the Barbatos's Arm Cannon set. They're its primary ranged weapons, and they're very respectably powerful. They've also got just as wide a firing arc as any Shoulder Cannon set - the Bael's wings are quite well-articulated.

Edited by Iaculus on Apr 22nd 2021 at 2:33:41 PM

Yeah, I was gonna say, it's entirely possible for Bael to have its wings set to "hover" and take pot shots at targets while dancing around them.

I think it's the other way around. From what I understand, Mobile Armours in IBO were designed to the ultimate pinnacle of weapons systems, and thus no expense was spared for them by their builders. Nanolaminate armour is less effective against kinetic-based weaponry than beam weapons, so I think the Mobile Armours had nanolaminate armour to counter rival weapon systems, but when they got out of control, my guess is that the engineers handling the Gundam-Frames eventually realised that kinetic-based loadouts, especially the more heavy-set ones, would break the armour.

Edited by G2BattleConvoy on Apr 22nd 2021 at 3:55:02 PM

The Gundam Ground Type S is one Gundam I can think of without head vulcans, although I think it probably doesn't apply since it was developed from a GM or something.

Edited by KZN02 on Apr 22nd 2021 at 10:38:28 AM

If I recall correctly, the Type S is based on the Ground Gundam, which was a limited mass-production ground-specced Gundam, and those probably didn't have Vulcan guns.

EDIT: Okay, turns out the Type S was developed from the Gundam Head (essentially a GM with a Gundam-style head stuck on it) if you go by Thunderbolt.

Edited by G2BattleConvoy on Apr 22nd 2021 at 9:28:15 AM

The Turn A didn't have head vulcans either,

The Ground Type had a Vulcan, but it was in its chest, not the head.

I remember there being a scene in Thunderbolt season 2 where head vulcans would have been handy on the Type S, but would have increased the age rating of the anime had they been used on enemy infantry.

Edited by KZN02 on Apr 22nd 2021 at 3:02:44 AM

Psh, like Thunderbolt of all series is averse to making people go squish.

What do you all think is the most VIOLENT Gundam series? Just series, not manga/games/etc.

The obvious answers would be Thunderbolt and IBO, but SEED got weirdly and disturbingly gory at times (especially if you count Stargazer).

Kinda depends on how you want to define "most violent". Seed probably wins on sheer gore, as it has several scenes of people popping like balloons when hit with various energy weapons, but they're generally very quick shots and we don't see them like, screaming in agony or anything, so describing it is worse than watching it. IBO has the most focus on defeating mecha by killing pilots specifically (as opposed to the entire mecha exploding), as well as having some shockingly sudden violence outside of combat, but it doesn't really do much gore beyond your typical "bloody scalp wound dripping all over pilot's face". F91 probably deserves a mention for the sheer brutality, with things like the infamous scene of a random civilian woman dying when a mecha-sized shell casing falls on her head... and, you know, the whole thing with autonomous buzzsaw drones programmed to murder every living thing in a colony, while leaving the colony itself intact.

Hard to think of many other characters in Gundam who had death scenes as disturbing as Mudie's in Stargazer, though. Some, yes, but not many.

Yeah, that one's definitely up there, though it's kind of a one-off for Stargazer. Nothing else in Stargazer (or the rest of Seed/Destiny, for that matter) is really like it. Probably the closest thing to that vibe in general is Thunderbolt.

To be fair, nothing can beat having your arm vaporised just by having a beam saber hit you in that precise spot in the cockpit.

Not sure if this fits here but is that f2p Gundam game, Battle Operations 2, worth playing or is it just kinda bleh?