My favorite moments of Mobile Suit Gundam realism

 I've watched quite a few Gundam shows and read some of the manga as well. While I enjoy the robots going at it in combat and the drama of the people involved, I'm a bit of a nerd and enjoy it when real-world principles are applied to making certain things in Gundam work. 

Below is a list of my favorite instances of tech realism.

1. Mobile Suit Gundam - Magnet Coating

The original Mobile Suit Gundam's titular machine ran into a problem towards the latter end of the show. While it had taken a while to master, its pilot, Amuro Rei, had gotten to the point where he was outpacing the machine.

To put it simply, the Gundam could only move so fast without damaging its joints, but Amuro's brain was faster, and he thus could not push the Gundam to its limits without wrecking the internal.

The solution was to apply "magnet coating". Real-world arms and legs are connected to joints, and the flexibility of those joints determines how well the limb can move. Magnet coating was basically meant to make the Gundam's limbs more flexible by decreasing their friction, which reduced wear and tear. This is a reasonable analog to oiling certain parts of a machine to avoid damage and maximize the resistance said parts have to abrasion and other types of damage.

As for how the actual Magnet Coating worked, well, Amuro had no issues with his Gundam until the very end of the war.

2. Mobile Suit Gundam Wing - Tallgeese

In the Gundam Wing universe, the great-grandfather of all mecha is the Tallgeese. Basically a super-prototype of mecha in general, the Tallgeese was such a gigachad of a machine that it was able to keep parity with most of the later Gundams to an impressive degree.

Unfortunately, that was also a bad thing,

The Tallgeese was built as a concept of a humanoid mobile weapon, and did not get extensive testing with actual human pilots. It was also capable of so much power and thrust that it was very deadly to its pilots, subjecting them to over 15 Gs (a measure of how much gravitic force is imposed on the human body) at the bare minimum and often much more.

For those not aware, even trained pilots can only endure around 10 G's for short periods. The Tallgeese was literally applying so much force to the pilot that they were dying from their hearts giving out, their lungs imploding, or even being internally impaled on the shards of their own shattered ribcages.

In short, the Tallgeese just were not safe for human use. The OZ (Organization of the Zodiac) decided it would be far safer to make the Leo, a severely detuned and much cheaper scaled-down version of the Tallgeese for mass production.

As for the original, they still wanted to get some use out of it, and OZ Colonel Zech Merquise, with a combination of utter daring and simply being too stubborn to accept his limits, ultimately mastered piloting the Tallgeese.

3. Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam - Ballute System

Ironically, this fun bit of realism is actually based on a very similar concept in the real world.

In the real world, a ballute (balloon and parachute porrtmaneu) is basically a high altitude breaking device. It's basically a balloon parachute deployed to generate drag to slow down a plane or some other flying object.

The ballute has a lot of uses. It can operate like a brake for a plane, be attached to bombs to slow their descent, and even provide a shield of sorts for objects re-entering the atmosphere from space.

In Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, they used ballutes for very similar purposes.

The ships and mobile suit units in Zeta Gundam, especially as used by the AEUG group in the show, had to, at one point, re-enter the atmosphere. While some ships and mobile suits were designed since the original Gundam to be able to enter the atmosphere under their own power, it still generates tons of heat and friction, which could greatly erode the ship or mobile suit in question.

This is why the ballute system was used.

That said, there is a big downside to using this system for protection during atmospheric re-entry: You can be very vulnerable to attack.

In Zeta Gundam, one of the Titans (the enemy group in that show) met his death in this manner. Forgetting his own machine was programmed to auto-deploy a ballute, and being too focused on shooting one of the AEUG pilots, he was left a sitting duck. His ballute was shot and destroyed, and the Titan member turned into a fireball.

I've been watching a lot of Gundam lately, so I'll see if I can write a sequel to this post.