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Lieutenant General Gundam

Night said:
You do realize that was part of the question and hence cannot be the answer, yes?
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Byarlant looks inhuman and has a complex design that allows a range of unconventional movements and images, without being married to a specific character.

Everyone likes Byarlant but you. :V

The new GBF stuff looks pretty cool; the announced suits (even the fucking bizarre CHINAGGUY) are interesting and the multiple projects and return of Sei sound good too. With some positive message kids shows and more reinvention of UC coming out, it's a good time to like robot pews.
 
Sublink said:
Byarlant looks inhuman and has a complex design that allows a range of unconventional movements and images, without being married to a specific character.
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We have mobile armors for that!

I mean really that's what Byarlant is in a sense. Because of its lack of normal hands it pretty much acts like a particularly humanoid mobile armor rather than a mobile suit in most fights and usually gets treated as a mobile armor-like force in the narrative.
 
Night said:
We have mobile armors for that!

I mean really that's what Byarlant is in a sense. Because of its lack of normal hands it pretty much acts like a particularly humanoid mobile armor rather than a mobile suit in most fights and usually gets treated as a mobile armor-like force in the narrative.
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Occupies a somewhat unusual narrative niche because of its complex and visually distinctive design, isn't heavily associated with any one character even after Jerid, ex bad guy suit so its got a bit of edge, what's not to love?

After that great showing in Unicorn Episode 4 Kobe's reputation will only be enhanced!

Also I love that the unit that fought at Torrington had undergone a bit of de-Titansification through its conversion to a visor type sensor arrangement.

Mono-eyes really do have bad optics after all! :V
 
Night said:
We have mobile armors for that!

I mean really that's what Byarlant is in a sense. Because of its lack of normal hands it pretty much acts like a particularly humanoid mobile armor rather than a mobile suit in most fights and usually gets treated as a mobile armor-like force in the narrative.
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The distinction is a frivolous one. Indeed, many of the IBO designs us the same kind of animalistic proportions and non-human features for the same effect.

I especially like the head and shoulders; the changes for Unicorn with the head was heavy stuff.

Being mad at Byarlant being used too much when it was used twice ever seems odd given the wide reach of the -gguy empire. :)
 
Sublink said:
The distinction is a frivolous one. Indeed, many of the IBO designs us the same kind of animalistic proportions and non-human features for the same effect.

I especially like the head and shoulders; the changes for Unicorn with the head was heavy stuff.

Being mad at Byarlant being used too much when it was used twice ever seems odd given the wide reach of the -gguy empire. :)
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What did it for me was the switch to those huge triple digit claw/gun mounts on the elongated forearms. They really enhanced the design's inhuman proportions and character quite effectively, I think.

I'd go so far as to suggest that, along with the shoulder thruster binders, they constitute a massive improvement over the original design.
 
Yeah the claws and their length makes it a really 'square' kind of robo-ape thing, with the huge shoulders and the forward head. It's like a Hy-gogg bulldozer!
 
Sublink said:
Byarlant looks inhuman and has a complex design that allows a range of unconventional movements and images, without being married to a specific character.
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Well technically it should be associated with Jerid, but he was a loser so no one really cares.
 
Salty said:
Pistols at dawn would well suit the honor of a gentleman.

For you, knives shall suffice. Well, knife. And now.
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God, fans are such fans. It's not perfect for reuse. The Man from Jupiter is too associated with the O, even though I'm pretty sure someone else flies it. You can't paint it green and use it again. This isn't Build Fighters! :V

@Night youll have to try that one again, champ. What standby of no EF armours? I've heard fans don't consider the Titans to be the EF ;) ;) ;) so I'm not sure where you're going with this. Byarlant is a mobile suit because it looks, acts, is used, and is sized like a mobile suit. If you call Byarlant a mobile armour, what's the point of the distinction? It doesn't even have a little door that opens to reveal a beam cannon like in 1978! This seems pretty tangential to you apparently being sad it's used again (ie for the third time in 40 years).
 
Sublink said:
@Night youll have to try that one again, champ. What standby of no EF armours? I've heard fans don't consider the Titans to be the EF ;) ;) ;) so I'm not sure where you're going with this. Byarlant is a mobile suit because it looks, acts, is used, and is sized like a mobile suit. If you call Byarlant a mobile armour, what's the point of the distinction? It doesn't even have a little door that opens to reveal a beam cannon like in 1978! This seems pretty tangential to you apparently being sad it's used again (ie for the third time in 40 years).
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So aside from you using as dismissive a tone as possible and totally misreading my argument (like...really, do you think I'm upset at the Byarlant itself? I was curious why anyone gave a damn about the Byarlant since Zeta and why it seemed to capture a bunch of imagination; this commentary on the mobile armor is my guess), do you actually have anything to add to this discussion? Because you're not actually engaging with it, just pretending it doesn't matter without providing a reason.

Also the Titans as part of the EF thing was kind of settled by the EF council and Dakar and them having lost their bid to actually become the rulers of the EF, so, you know. It was decided they weren't the EF and then they decided should be (the rulers, in fact) and started a war about it and lost the war. Kinda definitive, you know?

The point of the distinction is, again, narrative: we pretty much never get televised series with mobile armors as friendlies, and this is the first time the straight EF has been treated as having a mobile armor-level threat in their arsenal. (The Byarlant Custom's scene is pretty much what you'd expect from your average Zeon wunderwaffen, notably.) There are solid reasons for this related to the stories Gundam likes to tell and how it likes to tell them.

(As an aside, the argument the Byarlant was chosen to inject range of wide nonhuman motion and maneuvers is...kinda suspect. Mobile suits have always been giant robots. They never had to obey strictly humanoid rules of motion; they could always have had wider ranges of motion on the joints or simply move in ways that show they aren't humans; firing 90 degrees off where their eyes are looking, the way the Ground Gundam jumps in early 08th MS Team in no way resembled human jumping, etc.)
 
Stop: Oh my god
  • Staff Post
    • oh my god Shut the heck up.

    e: I've been asked by @foamy to correct this warning as it's not very useful, and I have to agree. I got frustrated when I saw this same dance playing out again. Suffice it to say an innocent question about why a particular giant robot design shouldn't spiral out into the same kind of obstinate and nasty arguing that we've seen many times in the past.

    So little value is created by those arguments, so I thought it appropriate to just cut it off where it was.
     
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  • Staff Post
    • Night said:
    (As an aside, the argument the Byarlant was chosen to inject range of wide nonhuman motion and maneuvers is...kinda suspect. Mobile suits have always been giant robots. They never had to obey strictly humanoid rules of motion; they could always have had wider ranges of motion on the joints or simply move in ways that show they aren't humans; firing 90 degrees off where their eyes are looking, the way the Ground Gundam jumps in early 08th MS Team in no way resembled human jumping, etc.)
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    That bit about mobile suits being machines and therefore not having to obey human ranges of motion is true, but the RX-160S does all the things more humanoid mobile suits can do whilst looking like a vaguely insectile robo-gorilla. A GM zooming around in space shooting it's gun straight above it's head looks a bit like Superman in his classic pose I.e. recognisably human shaped thing doing something a bit odd; the Byarlant doing the same thing looks like a flying bulldozer-monkey with doom hands. It just looks weird, except in a visually distinctive way that's pretty effective for visual SF of this type.

    Also the bit about the Byarlant smashing fools like a Zeon MA makes sense, but really I read it as the Gundam stand-in during that sequence. It's the one-in-a-hundred super unit that doesn't get immediately blown away by the plucky militarists in their heavily outnumbered circus of weird robots, and instead it proceeds to utterly wreck them whilst being almost untouchable.

    That it's a design first deployed by the anti-Spacenoid SS only adds to the scene's potency. It's like the visual equivalent of someone sonorously intoning, " O FOOLS OF ZEON, SUMMONING THE ANGRY GHOSTS OF THE DEAD PAST WILL ROUSE ANOTHER, ANGRIER GHOST TO FIGHT AGAINST YOU", while Robin Diez blows people up.
     
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    If the definition of mobile armour is 'kills some guys', then isn't Unicorn a mobile armour? It kills more guys than Byarlant Custom in one scene, and isn't silly enough to be shot in the ass. Byarlant just looks cool and was piloted by a good pilot who attacked with the advantage of surprise. Hell, modern suits were immune to Byarlant Custom's only gun! That doesn't seem very mobile armour like to me. It shares an episode with a real mobile armour, which makes the idea even stranger to me.

    Anyway, Twilight Axis is definitely on my radar. Not just because I hope it continues to reframe late UC either; the premise is a really strong one, and after seeing Thunderbolt consistently sell similar ideas I'm pretty confident.
     
    It ambushed some scattered suits in a battle where Zeonic troops started getting overconfident and complacent. We're surprised here that it went on a short rampage before getting overwhelmed? Its built in weapon is probably just a side-arm equivalent. I bet it would normally sortie with heavier stuff but hey it's a surprise attack, they probably didn't leave the Mega Particle Photon Torpedo Disruptron in the same hangar it was in.

    Idk if the previous Byarlant of Zeta was totally destroyed. Was it? Gundam frequently reveals suits and ships written off as "destroyed" are in fact just mission kills and recoverable. Maybe they recovered it or it simply wasn't the only one they built and the Federation was still toying with it on the side as part of the reorganization plan. I kind of had the impression that it was capable of prolonged flight without a base jabber and this is a pretty big deal in UC. I'm sure if someone stuck a V-fin on it it'd cause fewer problems with fans because now it's a Gundam ok.
     
    Information: Official Staff Communication
  • Staff Post
    • official staff communication As @Ford Prefect's original warning was unclear in scope, I have removed the infractions from the people hit for ignoring it.

    alert However: Any further sniping related to whether one giant robot is some particular type of giant robot (i.e. replies to @Sublink and @Night's stuff above) will not be accepted. This goes for everyone.
     
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    • DocHawkeye said:
    It ambushed some scattered suits in a battle where Zeonic troops started getting overconfident and complacent. We're surprised here that it went on a short rampage before getting overwhelmed? Its built in weapon is probably just a side-arm equivalent. I bet it would normally sortie with heavier stuff but hey it's a surprise attack, they probably didn't leave the Mega Particle Photon Torpedo Disruptron in the same hangar it was in.

    Idk if the previous Byarlant of Zeta was totally destroyed. Was it? Gundam frequently reveals suits and ships written off as "destroyed" are in fact just mission kills and recoverable. Maybe they recovered it or it simply wasn't the only one they built and the Federation was still toying with it on the side as part of the reorganization plan. I kind of had the impression that it was capable of prolonged flight without a base jabber and this is a pretty big deal in UC. I'm sure if someone stuck a V-fin on it it'd cause fewer problems with fans because now it's a Gundam ok.
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    As far as I remember, the original RX-160 Byarlant only mounted the two mega particle guns on the forearms and carried two beam sabres; its triple digit manipulators, whilst smaller than those borne by the model RX-160S that fought at Torrington, precluded it from using other EFSF issue hand carried MS weaponry.

    Given that the Byarlant Custom's hands are even more huge three finger fuck-claws, it's probably safe to assume that it was also equally incapable of using hand carried stuff that a GM or Guncannon or whatever might with their more conventional manipulator arrangements. The main change from the original is that the arm mounts can fire in continuous beam and burst mode, and can also generate a beam sabre beam. Other than that it's basically the same warload.

    The second RX-160S unit which exists in an MSV manga (Bandé Desinée, I think?) and which also fights at Torrington not only has conventional hands, it also carries two enormous beam rifles on swivelling forearm mounts, along with two more cannon on back binders. I mention this because even though it's not the animation (dare I mention the c-word?), it does introduce the explanation that the Byarlant we see in Episode 4 was a validation and test unit made from spare Titans suit parts from several different designs, but was otherwise as fully armed as it was going to be. The two arm mounts and the claws were it. The second suit got all the cool toys. Edit: obviously this is a rationalisation from a separate work as to why a design from 0087 wasn't uprated to account for the 9 year gap, so take it as you will.

    Long story short, Diez sorted with his trousers on and fully zipped up, so to speak. Compared to its contemporaries from 0096 the Byarlant really is just that sparsely armed.

    What a difference 9 years makes!

    Edit: also yeah the Byarlant Custom can totally fly unaided in atmosphere thanks to extra huge fuel tanks and extra thrusters, which is just the tits
     
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    Claudette Savagely said:
    Edit: also yeah the Byarlant Custom can totally fly unaided in atmosphere thanks to extra huge fuel tanks and extra thrusters, which is just the tits
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    The original Byarlant could also flight unaided in atmosphere, the stated objective for the project was to build a MS that could maneuver and fight in the air without tranformation. Rather ironic that the Byarlant Custom unit 2 (the heavily armed one) can transform in an MA mode.
     
    Flare said:
    The original Byarlant could also flight unaided in atmosphere, the stated objective for the project was to build a MS that could maneuver and fight in the air without tranformation. Rather ironic that the Byarlant Custom unit 2 (the heavily armed one) can transform in an MA mode.
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    It's interesting that widespread unaided in-atmosphere flight capability doesn't seem to be a thing for Mobile Suits until around the time of Victory, with the deployment of the beam rotor and the miniaturisation of Minovsky Craft systems.

    I would have thought that the Federation in particular would have spent more effort to obtain that capability given how much of their territory is at the bottom of the gravity well, but Zeon's offensives would have looked super different if Zakus could fly.

    Maybe, at least as regards Unicorn, so circa 0096, it was more economical to invest in base jabbers and carrier ships to provide tactical and strategic mobility than going through the rigmarole of procurement or refitting?

    Related thing- how well can Jegans jump or fly in atmosphere?
     
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    Given enough power, a brick can fly, but it's hardly efficient and probably not fast. I doubt any of the flying suits before Victory actually have much of a combat radius without a Base Jabber; they either have to land to cool their engines (IIRC Minovsky thermonuclear jets are time rather than fuel limited) or to refuel if they actually use fuel.
     
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