Grypts Conflict - Titans MS Comparative Performance

[Underrated GM Custom]

Good morning everyone. Long time lurker, I made an account hoping you can offer some expert opinions.

I introduced by wife to Zeta Gundam this past year and we got about 2/3rds the way through before it was time for deployment. While she's excited to finish the series when I get back she has been asking some questions that I've been having a hard time answering so I'm hoping you all could help me out.

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Question #1 If the AEUG had a decent chunk of manpower composed of colony militia and former Zeon pilots shouldn't there be more Zeon type mobile suits being sortied?

My answer: Great question! I've always loved the Gelgoog design and would have loved to see the AEUG fielding those. It seems like any captured surviving zeon units were used by Federation / Titans though like the Galbady Beta and Act Zakus.

Are there any instances of AEUG in sidestories or manga using Zeon suits?
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Question #2 The Titans have a lot of different suits and don't seem to stick with them for very long. It doesn't always seem like each new suit is better than the last either, is there a listing of which suits have the best dogfighting performance?

My answer: This one is really tough. Hizacks and Marasais appear to be the bread and butter of the Titans in the show. I know the Barzam was introduced as a cost efficient machine with improved specs, but there is definitely a lot of unique designs and I don't really know why some of them don't get more usage. I know the transforming suits have a higher skill threshold, but it seems like they are still more than capable front line fighters even if the transformation aspect was never used. Aside from cost (and we know the Titans have resources aplenty) I'm not sure why we don't see more Gaplants and Gabthleys do be honest.

As for Dogfighting performance here is the list I plan on giving her. Please feel free to correct. I based this off of in-show performance rather than published specs which are not always consistent. Granted some of these suits we see with very skilled pilots (Yazan) and others with very mediocre pilots (Jerid).

Highest performance in a Dogfight:

Hambrabi
Messala
Gaplant
Gabthley
Byarlant
Asshimar
Marasai
Barzam
Galbady Beta
Hizack

(Note: I'm not including suits she hasn't seen yet)
Thank you for your time.

[MythSearcher]

Question #1 If the AEUG had a decent chunk of manpower composed of colony militia and former Zeon pilots shouldn't there be more Zeon type mobile suits being sortied?

My answer: Great question! I've always loved the Gelgoog design and would have loved to see the AEUG fielding those. It seems like any captured surviving zeon units were used by Federation / Titans though like the Galbady Beta and Act Zakus.

Are there any instances of AEUG in sidestories or manga using Zeon suits?

The simple reason is because in real life they have a hard time converting viewers from thinking that a mono-eye suit is on the side of the protagonist.
In fact, even Rick Dias is having a hard time doing so.
Tomino wanted the Marasai on the AEUG side and was mistaken by the anime staff as enemy units and thus ended up on Titans side in the show, they changed the settings a bit and made it so that it was developed by AE for AEUG, but was discovered by Titans and had to give them for Titans as a cover-up about producing MSs for AEUG thus the produced units never reached AEUG.

The in-universe reason is that AEUG is founded by a Brigadier general of EFF, and he wrote off a large chunk of functioning Salamis and GM IIs as retired units and transferred them to AEUG. It would be much easier to support and maintain EFF units rather than Zeon units because you can obviously just manufacture the parts in the open without creating a lot of suspicion from others since EFF is still using these units and still needed way more parts for maintenance other than AEUG. AE later developed the Nemo which still used a lot of GM II parts for the same reason. Other units like the Rick Dias are produced by AE, the main (financial) supporter of AEUG and thus can produce parts for maintenance, and even if caught producing parts, they can still do something like the Marasai incident and just give some units to Titans and get away with it. While producing Zeon old units' parts really can't use the same trick to fool Titans.

The Zeon remnants' units aren't in good state anyway, a lot of them have trouble maintaining beam weapons, like in 0083, Cima's fleet can only support a beam machine rifle for the commander's unit. A lot of them are dissembling units for parts to maintain others. AE and some other groups are producing small amount of parts for some of these units(and upgrading them) as seen in MSV-R Return of Johnny Ridden, but they are getting pricier and only in really small numbers.

Question #2 The Titans have a lot of different suits and don't seem to stick with them for very long. It doesn't always seem like each new suit is better than the last either, is there a listing of which suits have the best dogfighting performance?

My answer: This one is really tough. Hizacks and Marasais appear to be the bread and butter of the Titans in the show. I know the Barzam was introduced as a cost efficient machine with improved specs, but there is definitely a lot of unique designs and I don't really know why some of them don't get more usage. I know the transforming suits have a higher skill threshold, but it seems like they are still more than capable front line fighters even if the transformation aspect was never used. Aside from cost (and we know the Titans have resources aplenty) I'm not sure why we don't see more Gaplants and Gabthleys do be honest.

Most of those are test units.
During the Gryps war, EFF/Titans had a lot of sites developing new units, and thus you get a lot of those stranger ones. That is also the reason why they had another numbering system for those instead of their regular: R=Renbou (Federation in Japanese), X for experimental/GM for Gundam Mass-production/GZ for Gundam Zeta + year of its design plan. So RX-78 means an experimental unit first designed in 0078 and RGM-79 means a mass-production unit in 0079.
During Gryps, you still have the "R" in front, but than MS obviously for Mobile Suit + a 3 digit number with the first two indicating the location of the development and the number sequencing that locations development number.
And as you can see, AE doing what AE does, it also contributed to the chaos of having too many different units.

As for Dogfighting performance here is the list I plan on giving her. Please feel free to correct. I based this off of in-show performance rather than published specs which are not always consistent. Granted some of these suits we see with very skilled pilots (Yazan) and others with very mediocre pilots (Jerid).

You will never find a list.
There is no official list and there aren't enough facts in the settings to give out a list.
You can calculated the thrust to mass ratio of the units with the thrust and max weight of the units, but that only tells you the acceleration rate of the units. You do not know the total thrust time of the units, efficiency of its propellant consumption at different thrust levels, the turning speed of the units or the power the limbs of the unit can use for its AMABC, and the total thrust time and thrust of the vernier thrusters, mass distribution of the units(which affects the effects of the vernier thrusters) even if you assume the number of vernier thrusts listed are all of the same spec.
You will also need to consider the weapons' mass, centre of mass, aiming speed, rate of fire, etc.(Even the unit has a slight advantage in turning and accelerating, if it is using a slow rate weapon it might be worse in dogfighting.)

[Seto Kaiba]

Question #1 If the AEUG had a decent chunk of manpower composed of colony militia and former Zeon pilots shouldn't there be more Zeon type mobile suits being sortied?

Odds are the AEUG's leadership would've considered using Principality of Zeon hardware a little... off message. It wasn't that long ago that Zeon had been actively waging war against its neighboring Sides, depopulating and even destroying colonies for siding with the Federation.

From what I've read, a lot of Zeon's machines that weren't taken by the Zeonic remnants fleeing to Axis or held in secret bases by Zeonic remnants on Earth were either scrapped or used for live weapons training by the EFF. The AEUG would've had a hard time laying hands on a sufficient quantity of the relatively rare Gelgoogs to do much in the way of good, and older models like the Zaku II or Dom wouldn't have been much use.

Are there any instances of AEUG in sidestories or manga using Zeon suits?

None which I can recall.

Question #2 The Titans have a lot of different suits and don't seem to stick with them for very long. It doesn't always seem like each new suit is better than the last either, is there a listing of which suits have the best dogfighting performance?

The Titans may be vicious, amoral, fascist oppressors but as the elite of the EFF they make dandy test pilots that nobody will particularly miss if they don't come back. The Titans were basically living the same nightmare Zeon was in the closing days of the One Year War, except they were throwing prototypes at their enemies by choice... rather than out of sheer desperation.

The data's too sparse to say which suits were actually the best in terms of combat performance, but generally in Gundam it tends to be that combat performance depends at least as much on the pilot's skill as the mobile suit's... so a great pilot in a junker could still wreck the sh*t of an inexperienced pilot in the latest and greatest. Char dispensed that trope often, engaging the Gundam in technologically inferior Mobile Suits and holding his own most of the time.

[domtropen]

Dom [not Rickdom] and its variants are still a pretty good MS on Earth, still being able to crush newer grunt MSs [not pilot by major charactors] decades later.

Asshimar is One MS from Z/ZZ era that get developed further to Anksha. IIRC in AOZ Hyzenthlay II is an attempt to duplicate Gabthley.

[tHeWasTeDYouTh]

Galbady Beta was actually used by the Earth Federation Luna II garrison and only after the Titans ask for help did they get this suit in large numbers (think Titans use one in one of the Titan Test Team manga to test a new booster pack or something). The Earth Federation was the one that used some Zeon suits during Z Gundam. In some of the mangas you have a Zeon Remnant unit that would use old Zakus with extra generatiors so they could use beam weapons, putting wire hands to have better shooting and also attaching missiles to the suits as well

[Underrated GM Custom]

Good morning everyone,

Thank you for the replies. I've done a lot of reading on the Gryps conflict behind the scenes on this forum but before today I had not learned the AEUG was originally created by a BGEN writing off a small armada as decommissioned / retired. Pretty sly!

Ultimately I think it's too bad during the airing date that mono-eyes were seen as bad guys, but it's not surprising considering all of 0079 a monoeye was not fighting for the enemy. I've always enjoyed the bulky monoeyes from Zeta especially the Rick Diaz and Dijeh, but it makes sense from an in-universe and out of universe perspective why having zeonic traits may not help the cause. I had always thought of AEUG as an anti-federation organization so the thought of them using Zeon suits seemed normal to me. Thanks for the info folks!

As far as a Dogfighting performance list, I know we can't do that based off of any of the Specs (which vary a lot of from series to series especially with 0080 and 0083) but I was thinking of giving one to my wife based off of a Qualitative analysis instead of a Quantitative specs based list. My favorite part of watching Zeta gundam is that there are a host of skilled pilots on both sides of the conflict, and as a result the team good guy has a lot pyrrhic victories. We don't really see an outclassed suit with an ace pilot vs an indestructible white devil in Zeta. Here's what I'm thinking for a list to give my wife, let me know if it seems reasonable.

Assumptions: We look at the mobile suit performance based on their in-show performance. We also assume that the key pilots using these suits are of a comparable skill level to the main cast. We'll break up the suits into tiers with each one suit able to stay there if they are a threat or have neck and neck performance to the AEUG suits based on the animation. Starting with Zeta being the highest performance, then Hyaku Shiki, then MK II / Rick Diaz, then Nemo.

Zeta
Threat - Hambrabi, Gaplant
Justification: The Hambrabi is used by the guy you love to hate, Yazan, to excellent effect as well as two other members of his wing. While the Zeta has some extreme versatility, the Hambrabi does appear to out dogfight it on several occasions. Same with the Gaplant piloted by Yazan vice Rosamia.

Hyaku Shiki
Threat - Asshimar, Gabthley, Messala
Justification: Buran walloped Hyaku Shiki more than a few times. The Gabthley team was difficult to take down for our heroes but there didn't seem to be a performance gap. Messala trounced multiple suits with Scirroco, but with Sarah, well not as much. The newtype pressure from Scirocco also provided an extreme advantage in that fight. Performance wise I'd say Messala trumps Hyaku Shiki but is still below the Zeta level.

MK II / Rick Diaz
Threat - Marasai, Barzam
Justification - Marasai are early near peer competitors to the MK II and Rick Diaz team. The Barzam is supposedly a cheaper improvement over existing suits, but the not great pilots means it never shines. Really Barzam might be in the Nemo tier when you factor in the lack of pilots.

Nemo
Threats - Galbady Beta, Hizack, Barzam?

The one I have no idea what to do with is the Byarlant. Amazing performance in Unicorn and Twilight Axis but stuck with Jerid as a pilot in Zeta.