Tech Pedantry Thread: Reflector Bits

To applicably place these everywhere on an MS's body would be very difficult and likely expensive. It has to be remembered that things like the Pscyo were pretty big one-offs.

There's got to be a lot of money going into the things. A LOT.

>>13663663
Yeah, I think that's the main limitation. Reflector Bits have really small coverage, they pretty much only work as point defense. Covering an entire suit in them would take so many generators as to be cost and manufacturing time prohibitive.

I always thought they would be kind of finicky compared to a traditional I-field. Needed to be tuned for that sweet mirror effect. That's fine when it's part of a limited production run special model that probably comes with additional budget for specialised maintenance, maybe not so much for general use.

Speaking of maintenance, it's probably easier when they're discrete units, but that isn't a slam dunk or anything.

Reflector bits are also part of a design brief, so they're built with an intended purpose. With the Psyco and Shambloo it was for improved non-LOS saturation bombardment. It's not something just tacked on.

That's my take, anyway.

EXs is kinda fucking gigantic though.

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>>13663663
>>13663736
>>13663743
I can accept these answers, yeah. I would argue that during the 0090s, MS design was trending so large and high in generator output that I-field generators like the FA-ZZ's would eventually become the norm, but it seems like a tech crunch happened between then and late UC (an economic bubble burst?).

Then you start seeing tiny MS, because they require fewer resources to build, trying to tank VSBR shots is a losing game, and it's possible that beam shields are a more energy-efficient form of anti-beam point defense.

By UC153 you see miniaturization like the Minovsky Craft, where tech that was the domain of battleships and Xi Gundams could be squeezed on manlet MS like the V2. It's possible that you'd see miniaturized I-fields in future tech progression, but the collapse of the Federation after Victory seems to have lead to a civilization-wide dark age.

My next question: Is there an explanation for how the Apsalus III had enough firepower to cavitate a mountain, despite running on three Rick Dom engines ducttaped together? Other than "bad writing," of course

>>13663836
>Is there an explanation for how the Apsalus III had enough firepower to cavitate a mountain, despite running on three Rick Dom engines ducttaped together?

Genuinely can't help you with this one.

While I tend to think that the absolute numbers in the model stats are too low for the demonstrated and implied performance of mobile suits, at the same time I don't think they've undershot by a million times. We'll just have to chalk this one up to artistic license.

>>13663856
Zeon spacenoid magic.
Also 08th had that big directorial change. May have something to do with it.

>>13663736
The Quin Mantha had a reflective i-field, though I don't think it was tuned to reflect beams accurately like the reflector bits

>>13663836
Crossbone X3 had miniature i-fields. They still had power (or was it cooling) issues because of the small size.

It turns out that Sentinel is actually one of the most bullshit, poorly thought out, masturbatory sidestories in existence.

At the end of Zeta the EFF is barely able to help the AEUG at all, in ZZ the AEUG is fucked and the Earth Federation flat out don't give a fuck, but apparently somewhere in the middle they were able to deploy some of the most expensive high tech fancy shit MS ever to fuck around with a tiny number of Titans remnants including three FAZZ with absurdly powerful High Mega Cannons before the Neo Core Fighter was even given to the Argama.

Never mind that the New Desides final plan is to attack Dakar with an Axis-supplied mobile armour and they are desperately chased by the Pegasus III when Haman just wants to cruise down there and occupy the place and is practically unopposed in doing so.

>>13663650

Ex-S Gundam doesn't have reflector bits. In fact, it has no psycommu system.

>>13663948
The Ex-S had two reflector incoms. Combined with its beam smartgun, this essentially gave it a 360-degree firing arc.

>>13664107

incom =/= bit

>>13663836
>how the Apsalus III had enough firepower to cavitate a mountain, despite running on three Rick Dom engines ducttaped together
They overclocked them, I guess?

>>13663836
>it seems like a tech crunch happened between then and late UC (an economic bubble burst?).
>Then you start seeing tiny MS, because they require fewer resources to build, trying to tank VSBR shots is a losing game, and it's possible that beam shields are a more energy-efficient form of anti-beam point defense.

It's not that there's an economic bubble burst. It's that the people designing Mobile Suits went "Wait a minute, you can't block a beam on a normal, mass produced MS with any efficiency. What we need to emphasize for combat purposes is SPEED, so you can dodge past most things." And then that end up helping when the Federation got into a fight with... Shit, I think it was Mars Zeon in F90? - where the other side was using normal MSes for that time period but the Feddies were using downsized suits and so they pretty much routed the enemy.

Now, of course, EVENTUALLY they found a way to block that shit on mass produced MSes, but by that point everything was speed based, so making a large, less mobile suit was just plain counterproductive. The only large things they made aside from battleships were things that were clearly one-offs, like that giant dragon-Jeeg-MS thing Zanscare fielded.

>>13665157
Dodgore yo. Doggorla, alternatively.

>>13663836
>Then you start seeing tiny MS, because they require fewer resources to build, trying to tank VSBR shots is a losing game, and it's possible that beam shields are a more energy-efficient form of anti-beam point defense.
It's like real life tank design.

They started off making stuff that can take hits, then better guns/ammo came in(Beam weapons in this case), and they realised that the armor is kind of worthless if the enemy is going to punch through it anyway so they dropped the armor for mobility(Downsizing the MS and reducing armor), then they figured out ways to let the things take some hits before going down(Beam shields that can stop beams without losing its effectiveness like regular shields) and strapped them on their MS.

>>13663933
The fazz is shit though, majority of its intnded weapons werent even on the actual units when deployed or were mock weapons Anaheim put on there to show what could be done if produced.The cannon in the head doesnt work and it cant transform.

To answer OP's question, it's usually some kind of prohibitive cost or engineering or practical reason why it isn't integrated into everything. Pretty much every machine with a combat grade I-field has been a unique machine or is extremely limited production (can count the number of identical units on both hands, etc). In later UC stories there are ships with frontal umbrella style beam shields but still no warships with I-field protection.

The Unicorn models had shield-mounted I-fields that only activated when in danger of being hit to get around duration and power and heat issues, but such a thing would probably need a newtype to be really effective at blocking incoming beams.

One of the Crossbone Gundams had twin I-fields mounted in the arms that remained active for a set duration but the cooldown period was longer than the time they could be kept active for, meaning it wasn't a foolproof protective system.

As far as I can guess, reflective bits like those on the Psyco Gundam Mark II and Shamblo make it work because the things are managed by some computer that can tell each reflector exactly when to shut off and turn back on, and share the workload to cut down on the usual time duration and heat issues that plague most I-field systems.

>>13665155
MS weapons can have higher power ratings than the reactors that powered them. Like the ZZ's hi mega cannon that when used for the first time completely drained the Gundam's energy reserves and left it unable to move. It's unclear if the rating is for energy output or power consumption or whatever. They can probably store electricity in capacitors to get around power requirements, but we're still missing some relevant details like power consumption over a period of time and stuff.

>>13664107
Incoms are wired bro, that limits both the mobility of its positioning and then doesnt require some pyscommu bs to work.

>>13665189
>and it cant transform.

Not like ZZ needs to transform very often, but you know.

>>13665190
Also bits require newtype or cybernewtype pilots for psycommu

>>13665194
well, he was talking about the neo corefighter. Which is only relevant if fazz could transform and do anything except look cool but die like a GM.

>>13665200
The FAZZ is a fine suit, it's just lacking conventional weapons and the pilots were snipers that panicked when the motherfucking Gundam Mark V got up in their shit.

The Gundam Mark V is a goddamned monster, it shattered the teeth of the pilot while he was pulling high G maneuvers.

>>13665189
>The cannon in the head doesnt work
Doesn't matter when they have a handheld one that's more powerful, more accurate, and can be fired ten+ times to one.

Just try to explain how the Argama, the flagship of the AEUG, which is ordered to DESTROY FUCKING AXIS, gets the ZZ without the FA kit as its only new MS along with the leftovers of two outdated Gundams yet they use three whole units to test an addon for it and chuck the Ex-S (which is comparable to the real Full Armor ZZ), Mk.V, multiple Z Plus, a pile of Neros, and a new Argama and four other ships at some shitty base rebellion the same week.

That's even putting aside that the Full Armor is portrayed as pretty much just a random pile of missile launchers and shit chucked together like FA Unicorn in the show. (Unicorn mercilessly wanks off ZZ every moment it can after all) Or that there's absolutely no reason for ZZ to not have the Enhanced ZZ parts from the start if they're on the FAZZ.

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>>13665282

Well all of this is a consequence of Sentinel's retconning. When it was being serialized in Model Graphix magazine, Sentinel was supposed to happen after ZZ. But, for some stupid reason, that got changed when everything was collected together into the Gundam Sentinel book -- and Sentinel was shoehorned into the end of Z/start of ZZ. What the actual fuck. Retardo con mucho gusto.

>>13663836
>Is there an explanation for how the Apsalus III had enough firepower to cavitate a mountain, despite running on three Rick Dom engines ducttaped together? Other than "bad writing," of course

There is no answer other than bad writing. 08th MS team is total shit when it comes to tech, utter BS. Not only could the Apsalus holepunch mountains, it could break the sound barrier using Minovski flight -- something that wasn't possible until the V2 in UC 0153.

FUCKING BULLSHIT SUCKS

>>13665216
A single tooth chipped while he was clenching his teeth during an evasive maneuver.

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>>13665307
Did someone say mountain?

>>13663836

>My next question: Is there an explanation for how the Apsalus III had enough firepower to cavitate a mountain, despite running on three Rick Dom engines ducttaped together? Other than "bad writing," of course

Complete drainage of their power, converting it into a particle beam. For example, if you took Unicorns Beam Magnum and converted all of its shots int one shot you'd have something like the Hyper Beam cannon on the one ship from Episode 3.

>>13668224

There is no way to justify melting through a mountain. Even Nahel Argama's ship class Hyper Mega beam canon couldn't do that. It just burnt off some surface material of Axis and knocked it around.

>>13668320

"Creative adaptation"

>>13665318
Did the mountain listen to his song?

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I have another question!

There are two dominant eye designs in UC MS: Binocular eyes, either covered by a gundam facemask or a GM visor, and the monoeye, which moves around on multiple rotating tracks. Because 360-degree panoramic cockpits are standard in later MS, it can be assumed that cameras situated on other parts of the body provide basic vision, while the MS's "eye" is responsible for aiming and viewing objects in more detail.

It also seems that most of what an MS pilot sees is actually a real-time simulation of the events around him, correcting for the visibility issues present in space combat and the visual obfuscation of his own MS (limbs, muzzle flashes from weapons, etc.). We see confirmation of this in CCA, when Char is able to "surrender" a fleet of enormous balloons that the Federation's camera's mistakenly render as battleships.

Obviously, the real purpose of monoeyes and visors is to give the viewer a visual shorthand for good guy MS/bad guy MS. Has there ever been an in-universe explanation, though? If you were to swap the heads of say, the Nu Gundam and the Sazabi, would their be any meaningful difference in their performance?

>>13668432
>two eyes under the visor and not a suite of sensors
eh not how i thought it worked desu

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Also, based on >>13665190 and >>13668224's answers, it seems the only reasonable explanation for the Aps III is that 90% of its mass is capacitors, and it needs to charge for a week between shots.

Based on my experience with old CRT TVs, a capacitor bank the size of a city block probably isn't the safest thing to prop up on stilts. Shiro & Aina probably only survived because that shot drained them beforehand.

>>13668432
There was an episode of ZZ where they hastily fitted a Zaku head onto the Zeta Gundam so it could go out and fight. The Zaku eye was working but it still had a fucked up field of view.

Zeta MSV also has a series of prototype machines that tested various heads on a mockup of the Zeta's MS mode, in the end they decided a twin eye design was best.

Performance-wise nothing else about the MS should change, but worse cameras can make it more difficult for the pilot to find, see, and target enemies.

>>13668432
The GM only has a mono-eye under the visor. Same with the Jegans and Jestas.

>>13668432
There is, but it's all technical gobbedly-gook babble. Something about the cost versus efficiency of binocular eyes versus mono-eyes and the way they interface with the OS is all we get from one of the 0079 MSVRs/fact books.

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>>13668523
No, the original GM has multiple eyes. Different variants can have multiple sensors in a different layout or a single main eye.

>>13668532
Also, personally I like to think that the dual eyes allow the MS to more accurately determine distance and render their screen graphics in 3d for pilots, like a 3DS screen. I mean, you almost never see range numbers in the middle of pitched battles in Gundam, do you?

>>13668541
That looks like there's only 1 camera behind the visor.

>>13668432
I really like the idea that the GM is just a gundam with a visor and a faceplate.

>>13668432
>It also seems that most of what an MS pilot sees is actually a real-time simulation of the events around him, correcting for the visibility issues
>>13668432
>when Char is able to "surrender" a fleet of enormous balloons that the Federation's camera's mistakenly render as battleships.
FUCK.
OFF.
For the godzillionth time, this is NEVER mentioned ANYWHERE in Gundam. The goddamn news cameras could see just fine, there is absolutely no problem that needs to be solved by your vr headcanon.
Are you EVER going to shut up with this bullshit?

>>13668550
There's the mohawk camera, the large camera lens behind the visor, the smaller camera lens under the large one, and then four rectangular spots where "eyes" would be.

>>13668571
They do mention using CG a few times throughout UC.

>>13668571
unicorn and zeta