OYW production and deployment numbers in light of WWI-III

[blut_und_glas]

I know the topic of OYW production/deployment numbers has been done to death around here (I did take a good long look at older threads before posting), still I would like to bring it up once more - with a slight twist.

The discussions I read focussed on comparing various sources from the Gundam franchise itself (publications, model kit manuals, games, the animations themselves). This obviously does not yield a coherent picture, especially as the Entertainment Bible 39 numbers (also seemingly quoted in some later publications) are so much higher than numbers given elsewhere. (Instead of restating all that info here, I am just putting two links to older threads which I found particularly informative (OYW Ship Count, Mobile Suit Production Numbers), though there were a lot more threads in a similar vein to sift through.)

There seems to be somewhat of a consensus, that the higher numbers from EB39 are overinflated and should be discounted, as they not only do not mesh well with other print sources but also are at odds with most of the animation.

What these previous discussions (at least the ones I found!) did not do, however, was put the numbers in a context outside of the franchise and compare them to historic figures.

Now, obviously we have no space or MS battles to compare with, but we do have two world wars (and a third one looming on the horizon when Gundam originally saw the light of day) of which at least one is recognized as a major inspiration/parallel of the One Year War.

So, a quick trip to Wikipedia and a history bookshelf gives us some numbers to work with (mostly World War II, but including one entry each for I and III for good measure):

World War I
At Jutland, around 150 British ships (around half of those destroyers) and 100 German ships (nearly two-thirds of them torpedo boats) met in the war's largest naval battle.

World War II
Right before the invasion of Poland, the Nazi Wehrmacht counted close to 3000 tanks and another 1000 armoured vehicles for recon and command purposes. The Luftwaffe had nearly 4000 planes, more than half of which were meant for combat roles.

The Battle of Britain aerial campaign saw 2000 aircraft on the side of the Luftwaffe versus 2500 planes of the RAF.

Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union (and the largest land invasion ever undertaken), included around 4 million personnel, more than 4000 tanks, another 4000 aircraft and over 40000 artillery pieces (what is it with Barbarossa and the multiples of 4?).

In contrast, Overlord, the invasion of Normandy, had around half the number of troops but far more equipment.

On the naval side, in the Pacific theatre, the Imperial Japanese Navy sported a total of around 400 warships and close to 2000 aircraft. While at the end of the war, the US Navy had some 800 warships.

Some more detail: At Pearl Harbor it was 50 vessels and 400 aircraft per side (not counting tankers and such). Coral Sea was about half that per side. Midway had 30 US ships and 350 aircraft versus 20 ships and 250 aircraft of the Japanese and Leyte Gulf more than 200 ships and 1500 aircraft versus 70 ships and 300 aircraft.

World War III
In 1991, after it had already seen massive reductions in its strength, the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany as one of the main striking arms of the Warsaw Pact in case of war with NATO still numbered some 350000 soldiers operating over 4000 tanks, 8000 other armoured combat vehicles, 3500 artillery pieces, 700 planes and 700 helicopters, amongst others.

OYW in Space
Drawing parallels between naval and space battles is a bit tenous from the 'plausibility' side of things but works well on a more 'metaphorical' level. The big question there is what ship classes should we assume to be equivalent to each other. The obvious thing to do would be to count battleships as battleships, cruisers as cruisers, and carriers as carriers. There are two problem with that, though.

For one, it leads to really low numbers of ships (like the ubiquitous Musai and Salamis) which make even the 'accepted' fleet numbers from Gundam sources look vastly overinflated. On top of that, it leaves large parts of the historical fleets without an equivalent (unless we want to count assault boats as combined destroyer/torpedo boat/submarine equivalents).

As the mainstay of space fleets according to Gundam sources are (light) cruisers and destroyers make up the larger part of the headcount of historical fleets, I would probably suggest to draw the parallel here, while all cruisers and battleships could go to heavy cruisers (Chivvay) and/or battleships. Also, at least for Zeon, carriers and battleships can probably be rolled into one as far as these parallels go. (I think the Musai - destroyer analogue works particularly well, given that Japanese destroyers in World War II were seen as superior to their American counterparts at the start of the war - same as with the Musai and Salamis.)

Finally, if we count mobile suits as combat aircraft equivalents, EB39 suddenly does not look totally off any longer in terms of ship numbers but still vastly inflated as far as MS go. The more accepted lower numbers for ships (MSV et al.) would also work, but here MS numbers seem to be very low (too low). So, coming from a 'metaphorical' interpretation of the historical comparison, the numbers for space battles and fleets would appear to make the most sense if they ran somewhere in the middle.

OYW on the Ground
On the ground, I have a feeling the comparisons should work out better for the Earth invasion and subsequent campaigns, simply on the grounds that the terrain which needs to be covered is the same, even though the total territory is larger.

With the fighting more comparable, the unit equivalents are easier to figure out as well. The obvious route in my mind being to lot OYW tanks and MS together under the same heading as historical tanks.

That however brings up one glaring problem when we bring in the Gundam sources: The number of MS needed by Zeon is staggeringly huge compared to the alleged production totals.

Either the Earth Attack Force was mostly composed of conventional forces (with MS only used by special formations, e.g. in particular hot spots), the Zaku was vastly more capable than armour (so that MS formations could be a lot smaller overall), or production numbers were much higher than usually quoted. All three of these option carry their own problems with them, being at various odds with print sources and the animation.

Unfortunately, a middle ground of sorts (as for the space battles) seems much harder to come by.

And with that, I leave off for now.

I would be really interested in some additional thoughts on the topic.

Regards,
jdw

PS: In case anyone wonders why I care about this, the answer is wargaming.

PPS: tl;dr: How to make OYW numbers plausible/comparable to WW numbers?

[AmuroNT1]

PPS: tl;dr: How to make OYW numbers plausible/comparable to WW numbers?

You don't. You use the official numbers, or you just make up whatever numbers you want. It's either accuracy to the source material, or change it for the sake of gameplay.

Also, World War III? I wasn't aware that term had been officially coined yet.

[toysdream]

You don't. You use the official numbers, or you just make up whatever numbers you want. It's either accuracy to the source material, or change it for the sake of gameplay.

If we've established anything over the years, it's that the "official numbers" contradict each other. Isn't this kind of reality check helpful, at least, for figuring out which of the many conflicting claims are more plausible?

And a lot of the Japanese writers who created the various accounts we have of the One Year War were, of course, military history buffs, so we can assume they had their eye on World War II comparisons when they were making this stuff up.


Regarding the Battle of Britain, it's worth bearing in mind that this wasn't a single "battle" in the sense we normally think of it - rather, it was a series of raids and skirmishes that went on for three months. Skimming Wikipedia, it looks like the maximum number of aircraft lost in one day was on the "Hardest Day" of August 18, 1940, when about 130 were destroyed and 100 damaged in multiple battles across Britain. Not sure how many aircraft were actually involved, but Wikipedia says the Germans dispatched about 260 fighters and bombers in total.

The campaign climaxed with "Battle of Britain Day" on September 15. Wikipedia says that Britain deployed about 630 fighters, to Germany's 620 fighters and 500 bombers. About 50 British fighters were destroyed or damaged, while the Germans lost about 80 aircraft.


Another record-setter was the Battle of Kursk, an engagement between Soviet and German forces that continued for about a month and a half. According to Wikipedia, the Soviet forces included about 2.5 million soldiers, 25,000 artillery pieces, 8,000 tanks, and 2,800 aircraft; the Germans fielded about 900,00 soldiers, 10,000 artillery pieces, 2,900 tanks, and 2,100 aircraft. (Going by Wikipedia's info on the total strength of the Red Army at the start of the campaign, that's equivalent to half its soldiers and artillery, a third of its aircraft, and all its tanks.)


On the whole, excluding Leyte Gulf, there really don't seem to be any real-world battles in which a single side deployed more than 1000 aircraft at once. At most, you might see a few hundred at a time, and the high production and loss figures are the result of many battles taking place over months or years.

So we have to make a bunch of adjustments and allowances. In Gundam, the battles are fewer and bigger; they take place over a shorter period of time, allowing less time for weapons production. On the other hand, it seems like they typically involve a bigger proportion of each side's forces, rather than a couple of aircraft carriers running into each other in a random corner of the Pacific Ocean. The nations are much bigger and have more resources, but mobile suits are bigger and costlier than 20th-century tanks and planes.

If we assume that all these factors somehow cancel each other out, though, then it seems reasonable that a major One Year War battle would involve hundreds (not thousands) of mobile suits on each side. The ships are harder to compare, as you note, because there isn't a direct Gundam analogue to the destroyers that made up most of the real-world fleets during WWII.

-- Mark

[Gelgoog Jager]

If I had to take pick, I would go for the higher production numbers of MS, especially with more recent information which seems to retcon previous facts:

-The myth about no GM variant getting more than 50 units produced, which IIRc was meant for all thsoe MSV GM variants. Nowdays we have the RGM-79[G] from 08th team, the RGM-79C from MS Igloo and even MSV-R's Night Seeker GMs, all which seem to have been in producer in quantities alrger than 50.

-In this thread, Mark pointed out that: The recent Ver. 2.0 kit manual adds that "However, some theorize that these production numbers do not include pre-production machines and custom types," and observes that the loss of data during the war and the possibility of unrecorded production sites make it impossible to determine a precise production total.

-The best example within Zeon would be the usual claim of only 165 Gelgoogs being produced during the war, which had to be retcon to only include A, B and C types (and even those start to sound questionable with increasing evidence of a significant number of Gelgoogs deployed/produced on Earth).

I would propose to consider that Zeon also had some unrecorded production sites, leading to a larger amount of MS:

-For example, IIRC we are told that Ramba Ral captured an industrial colony, but we in most OYW we never see any of these surviving colonies from Sides 1, 2 and 4, from which I assume the captured colony most be from. We could consider thsi a precedent of Zeon capturing facilities in outer space, some of which could have been sued to expand their MS production capabilities.

-On Earth, we are told that designs such as the Dabude, Gunship Heli and Weasel armored car were hybrids of Federation and Zeon weapons, whose original Federation designs (I think somebody pointed that they were soviet, russian or soemthing similar) were captured when Zeon invaded Earth. This would indicate some production capability on Europe, besides California Base.

-Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but I recall reading somethign about the problems with the two different chains of command on Earth: The EAF with HQ at California Base and the ground based MAF with HQ at Odessa (I don't rememeber if this was meant to be related to the existing conflicts between Dozle's SAF and Kyshiria's MAF, which do ends affecting Ramba Ral). If indeed that was the case, it might not be so surprising that Odessa set it's own MS manufactring facilities, in which case units such as the MAX-03, MS-07C-3, MS-08TX/N and YMS-09J would have been most likely produced at.

-Finally, not the best example, but we could consider that just like Ghinias set up the production facilities for developing the Apsaras, other large bases could have done the same to have MS production capabilities.

[toysdream]

Which higher set of numbers, though? There are plenty to choose from. Just to take the Gelgoog as a sample...

Gundam Century put the production run of the Gelgoog at 740 units. Just for comparison purposes, it put the total of the entire Zaku series at more than 8,000 units - including 3,246 units of the MS-06F - and the Ball at 1,200 units. The MSV kit manuals basically echoed Gundam Century, setting the total Gelgoog production run at 738 units.

The 1/144 ReGelgu kit manual later claimed that 67 Gelgoog units fought at A Baoa Qu, which seems pretty low by comparison.

Later yet, the Master Grade kit manuals claimed that - including pre-production types - 83 A types, 67 B types, and 15 C types entered combat. That comes to a total of 165 machines, but the figure was always supposed to include only A, B, and C types, so this isn't a retcon.

And meanwhile, Entertainment Bible 39 claimed that there were more than 200 Gelgoogs deployed at A Baoa Qu. (That's three times the number given in the ReGelgu kit manual.)

I suppose we could group these into two sets of figures. There's a lowball set from the kit manuals, where we have a combined 165 units of the A, B, and C types, and 67 Gelgoogs at A Baoa Qu. Then we have a higher estimate, where there are 200 Gelgoogs at A Baoa Qu, and a total of 738 units of all types. Based on the A Baoa Qu example, it seems like the high-end figures are about three times the low-end ones.

-- Mark

[MythSearcher]

For reality check, I will give further explanation later, but for now, I will say that the military strength should be relative to the country's actual economic power. we cannot do simple comparisons with WWI, II and the 1991 incident directly without looking at the population and economic power, resources of the EFSF compared to Zeon.

For starters, Gihren, if not making up numbers by too much, mentioned in his speeches that the EF got about 30 times in power(国力) and 10 times in military strength.
Knowing Gihren, he probably exaggerated the numbers(like 1/3 was stated as 1/2), but I'll make a simple deduction of Zeon having about 3 times the portion of its national budget spent in military as compared to EF.

Another point of reference would be the total population, we know some years before OYW, human population reached 11 billion, and about 90% of that lived in space.
However, the 2.8+0.2 billion(Gundam Officials) or 2.8+2 billion(Gundam Century) deaths during the One Week Battle plus deaths during the war at about September accounts for 50% of the population according to the narrator of MSG and . I'd say 50% used the latter number, about 4.8 billion deaths estimated during the OYW, where the 2 billion lost contact due to the climate change , disasters and such, and was thought to have died during the colony drop due to the heavy usage of Minovsky particles, but after the War, they found out only about 0.2 billion died.
So anyway, the population is around 10 billion before OYW, which is around 67% increase compared to the 60 billion figure in 1990's and much more then WWI and WWII era.
And the Earth got more than 2 billion, maybe 5 billion.
This goes pretty well with the narration of about half of humanity lived in space in the MSG movie.

And between 0050 and 0079, the Earthlings must be working really hard, in bed.

Anyway, I will give a modest guess range of the population ratio of EF:Zeon being somewhere between 30:1~15:1, giving Zeon around 32.2 million to 62.5 million population.
Which is still a lot compared to many WW countries.

Note that I am not using the Hard Graph data:
http://www.mechatalk.net/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=14961
Which contradicts the EF being 30 times more powerful speech of Gihren.
I will give credit to Gihren not exaggerating 3 times to 30 times because such lie would be way too obvious to see through, even by Gihren fans like Delaz.

Actual analysis will be given later.

[Brave Fencer Kirby]

With regards to population, we actually had a pretty comprehensive thread on this back on Gundam Evolution before it shut down. What we came up with as the most reasonable answer given the various datapoints available is that, pre-0079, there were about 11.5 billion people in the Earth Federation and 1.5 billion in Zeon -- but after the opening battles of the OYW, the Earth Sphere was down to 4 billion.

Here's the logic for that conclusion: we know that humanity is split roughly evenly between Earth and space (per the opening narration of the second and third movies of the MSG movie trilogy), and that half of humanity was killed off during the opening round of the One Year War (per the narration early in the TV series version of MSG), which totaled 6.5 billion people killed (per the original setting notes).

That makes the total population of the pre-OYW Earth Sphere about 13 billion, with 6.5 billion each on Earth and in space. That works out to a billion people per Side, except Side 3 (which gets 1.5 billion, due to its closed-type colonies) and Side 7 (which, along with places like the moon and various asteroid bases, had so few people as to be negligible in terms of the final total). So we end up with 6.5 billion Earth Federation citizens on Earth itself, and another 5 billion in the Sides, for 11.5 billlion total. Side 3 would have the remaining 1.5 billion spacenoids as Zeon citizens.

As far as the casualties of the opening of the war go, since everyone in Sides 1, 2, 4, and 5 are killed, that means 4 billion of our 6.5 billion total deaths were spacenoids and the remaining 2.5 billion were Earthnoids. If you want, you can take the figure of 200 million deaths on Earth from EB39 and call that the immediate death toll of Operation British; the remaining 2.3 billion would be from aftereffects (climate change, famine, etc). After the One Week Battle and the Battle of Loum, the population figures would be 4 billion on Earth, virtually no Earth Federation citizens left in space, a billion newly-independent people in Side 6, and 1.5 billion in Side 3. Post-OYW, Side 6 is folded back into the Earth Federation (and its population likely spread throught Sides 1 and 2, given that those are the one Sides we ever hear from again), leaving us with 5 billion Earth Federation citizens (4 billion on Earth and 1 billion in space) and 1.5 billion Republic of Zeon citizens.

Of course, both CCA and Unicorn mention population figures of 10 billion (in the former, Quess claims that 10 billion people live in space, and in the latter, 10 billion is used as the total human population a time or two), but that seems impossible to reconcile with anything we have for the One Year War.

[toysdream]

Just FYI, the narration in the Gundam III movie says that Side 3 has a total population of 150 million people, housed in 40-plus sealed colonies. This seems pretty low by Universal Century standards, but it's one of a the few figures we're given in the animation itself.

Here's one of the other data points from the animation: In the TV series, we're told that the Side 3 colony Mahal has a population of 6.5 million. If Side 3 has 45 colonies with similar populations, that would be about 300 million people - roughly the population of the modern-day United States.


As for figures not given in the animation, I just noticed that Tomino's original series proposal for Zeta Gundam - which is reprinted in Animedia's book on the series - says that there are 4 billion people "living on the surface of the Earth." That actually supports the estimates that Kirby runs through above.

I'd note that the claim that 80% of the pre-One Year War population lived in space never appeared in the animation. It comes from the First Gundam series proposal, and was later reprinted in a bunch of third-party books. But the opening narration in the Gundam II and Gundam III movies actually says that "half of humanity now lives in space". If we go by Sunrise's rule that "only filmed works are official", this would suggest a 50-50 split, and makes the low population figures given for Zeon in the original series a lot more plausible.


In fact, if Zeon has a population of 300 million - the higher end of what the animation narration would suggest - then Gihren's claim about Zeon having "less than 1/30 the strength of the Earth Federation" may well have been accurate as of the start of the war. 300 million x 30 = 9 billion, which would thus be the combined population of Earth and all the Sides except 3 and 6.

-- Mark

[MythSearcher]

Just FYI, the narration in the Gundam III movie says that Side 3 has a total population of 150 million people, housed in 40-plus sealed colonies. This seems pretty low by Universal Century standards, but it's one of a the few figures we're given in the animation itself.

Here's one of the other data points from the animation: In the TV series, we're told that the Side 3 colony Mahal has a population of 6.5 million. If Side 3 has 45 colonies with similar populations, that would be about 300 million people - roughly the population of the modern-day United States.


As for figures not given in the animation, I just noticed that Tomino's original series proposal for Zeta Gundam - which is reprinted in Animedia's book on the series - says that there are 4 billion people "living on the surface of the Earth." That actually supports the estimates that Kirby runs through above.

I'd note that the claim that 80% of the pre-One Year War population lived in space never appeared in the animation. It comes from the First Gundam series proposal, and was later reprinted in a bunch of third-party books. But the opening narration in the Gundam II and Gundam III movies actually says that "half of humanity now lives in space". If we go by Sunrise's rule that "only filmed works are official", this would suggest a 50-50 split, and makes the low population figures given for Zeon in the original series a lot more plausible.


In fact, if Zeon has a population of 300 million - the higher end of what the animation narration would suggest - then Gihren's claim about Zeon having "less than 1/30 the strength of the Earth Federation" may well have been accurate as of the start of the war. 300 million x 30 = 9 billion, which would thus be the combined population of Earth and all the Sides except 3 and 6.

-- Mark

I take another view. The written information is more canon than the animated film.
The anime contradicts each other here and there, and the written documents straight things out. I respect the anime data points, but if they contradicts with any written data, I will not consider them to be canon. Anime are more like documentary films, they are filmed from someone's perspectives and may not be consistent, just like the MSs in W and W EW, you get the same MSs with different designs, just like different directors using different clothes designers for the same history documentary.

That is why I use the 50% data point along with the 90% pop/90 billion in space data point, they do not necessarily contradict each other, you have 29 years, and people will multiply quite fast if given good enough environment, while the people in space have a more cramped environment, thus they are less likely to increase in such great numbers and will likely to decline due to ageing, space radiation and higher accident rates, etc.
Also, in 0050 you might actually get people moving back to Earth for various reasons and the EF opposed in policy but simply didn't care too much.(Economical reasons given that the Earth cannot have too little people living in it, or at least you need them to stay in a smaller area, or you simply don't have enough pop. density to support the luxurious lives of the higher ups.)

BTW, Zeon having a smaller pop. is not strange. Although they do have close type colonies, they are under economic sanction, and they have a hard time doing business with others, so you get a country similar to N.Korean or Iran nowadays. Even if they work really hard in bed, their death rates are still going to be much higher than other "countries" that have free trade with others.

The 300 million number is reasonable, or maybe the 150 million figure is as well.
If we look at the Ark Performance manga Gihren's Assassination plan, (spoiler warning)
Which is a 10 year anniversary movie in UC0090 to celebrate 10 year after the OYW's ended.
I'd say it's reference talking about how the population is decreasing but the Zeon government still emptied out large living areas and have the lights turned on randomly each night to fake a higher population is pretty rational and convincing.
Ark Performance is one of those military buffs(well, read their non Gundam manga, the Arpeggio of Blue Steel), and I assume this also happened during some actual war, and although the story is not canon, the depiction of the OYW should be quite accurate, Zeon is suffering even before the war, from the sanction, so their pop. is likely to drop from lack of resources.(maybe not as low as 150 mil, but still.)
So Gihren maybe exaggeration in the 1/30 number, but not exaggerating the EF's, but Zeon's(so it is not that hopeless?)
And if it is 150 mil or so, what's left of EF after the colony drop is still about 30 times of Zeon.
(4~5bil vs 150mil) And Gihren is still period accurate.

Back to the topic, I'd say if we are talking about reality check and production numbers, we might as well compare the production strength of Zeon with a 150~300 mil country, which would be about WWII USA's population to about double of that, assuming WWII USA is already at almost full military production rate in the last year of WWII, 1945, Zeon should have something like 1~2 times of it, and EF will have somewhere like 10~20 times of it.
I am aware of technological advancements in production but MSs and space war ships are also obviously far more advanced than WWII counterparts, so the numbers built might not be that much off, since they are also state of the art weapons during their time frame.
BTW, the MS production rate of the EFF, should be only looking into 3 months, not the whole year.

So I'll leave it to actual WWII buffs to do the math.

[Gelgoog Jager]

Regarding the population of Mahal, I have been thinking about it rather low population and I think it is possible it might have been Zeon's less populated colony at the the Solar Ray project was approved, which made it the best candidate to have its entire population evacuated to modify it into a colony laser.

Also, MS Igloo depicts Side 3 as having exactly 40 colonies before Mahal was turned into Solar Ray.

Some other notes of importance are that by 0083 we are told that the Federation is relocating at least two Island 3 colonies to Side 3 to deal with the overcrowding problem as part of the Second Colony Reclamation Project. The first such plan supposedly took place a year earlier on UC 0082, just 2 years after the end of the OYW.

Taking the 0083 scenario into account, the question would be: what's the maximum population that a closed type colony can hold?

This site which takes into account many realistic aspects proposed a maximum of 36 million people per colony. By this account, after the war and with only 39 colonies left, Side 3 would have been overcrowded with a population of over 1.404 billion people living on it (with 40 colonies closed type colonies it would have had a population ceiling of 1.44 billion).

This also raises the question of whether overcrowding might have also been a factor that led to the war and possibly allowed Gihren to justify the "depopulation" of other colonies with GG gas, in order to increase their available living areas.

[toysdream]

I take another view. The written information is more canon than the animated film.
The anime contradicts each other here and there, and the written documents straight things out. I respect the anime data points, but if they contradicts with any written data, I will not consider them to be canon.

Two problems with this. One is that Sunrise's own position is that "only filmed works are official" - this means they reserve the right to contradict any published info at a moment's notice. The other is that the published sources contradict each other all the time.

For example: One of the most popular sources of info on the One Year War, because it's one of the most detailed, is Entertainment Bible 39: Strategy & Tactics Encyclopedia. But this book is also riddled with errors and contradictions. (According to Japanese fan rumor, it was written in two weeks, which may have something to do with it.) It blatantly contradicts previous sources like the MSV books and Gundam Century on matters large and small, such as the number of ships and mobile suits at various battles, the fates of specific characters like Shin Matsunaga, the timing of major events, etc.

EB39 also uses the Zeta Gundam-era Side map, rather than the One Year War one, so all the Sides are in the wrong places. As a result, you have things like the Federation fleet rushing to Side 5 in response to a Zeon attack, which is based on the notion that Side 5 is about halfway in between Side 3 and Luna II. If Side 5 were properly positioned in front of the moon, this would be impossible.

Later publications like 2001's "Gundam Officials" addressed this problem by mixing all the conflicting claims together and removing the sourcing information, so you end up with a lot of "some say this, and some say that". But as an attempt to reconcile the discrepancies in previous published sources, it's not very successful. Treating the animation as a primary source, as Sunrise suggests, is actually a lot easier.

-- Mark

[MythSearcher]

Regarding the population of Mahal, I have been thinking about it rather low population and I think it is possible it might have been Zeon's less populated colony at the the Solar Ray project was approved, which made it the best candidate to have its entire population evacuated to modify it into a colony laser.

Also, MS Igloo depicts Side 3 as having exactly 40 colonies before Mahal was turned into Solar Ray.

Some other notes of importance are that by 0083 we are told that the Federation is relocating at least two Island 3 colonies to Side 3 to deal with the overcrowding problem as part of the Second Colony Reclamation Project. The first such plan supposedly took place a year earlier on UC 0082, just 2 years after the end of the OYW.

Taking the 0083 scenario into account, the question would be: what's the maximum population that a closed type colony can hold?

This site which takes into account many realistic aspects proposed a maximum of 36 million people per colony. By this account, after the war and with only 39 colonies left, Side 3 would have been overcrowded with a population of over 1.404 billion people living on it (with 40 colonies closed type colonies it would have had a population ceiling of 1.44 billion).

This also raises the question of whether overcrowding might have also been a factor that led to the war and possibly allowed Gihren to justify the "depopulation" of other colonies with GG gas, in order to increase their available living areas.

okay, 36 million per colony is way over crowded, the original Island 3 plan(O'Neil's proposal) called for 10 million, and Gundam somehow used the figure of 30 million for closed types, 36 million is, well, quite impossible to sustain.(Air and water circulation wise)

Mahal was chosen because it housed people that moved to Zeon shortly before the war broke out, and people there got little respect from the Zerks, that is how Gihren chose Mahal, not because it's less populated.

A country sanctioned from the rest of the world, in hash conditions and separated from the rest of the world, even with secret supplies, it would be quite hard to maintain its full population, especially when it is quite over crowded.

Side 3 was over populated possibly because of the colony reform and EF moving people to side 3 to lessen the hatred and control the people. There's quite a lot of deaths during the war, even accounting for the post war baby boom, it's hard to get the side over populated without external sources.

[toysdream]

The figure of 36 million per colony, which is often bandied about in Gundam publications, is another tidbit from the original series proposal:

One Side is made up of 36 to 40 colonies. With 36 million people in each colony, 1.3 billion people can inhabit a single Side.

In practice, every population figure we've been given in the animation or in Tomino's novels is far smaller. I already mentioned the figure of 6.5 million for the Zeon colony of Mahal. In Char's Counterattack, Amuro says that Londenion is an old colony with a population of about 5 million. And in Tomino's Victory Gundam novels, we're told that Amelia, the capital colony of the Zanscare Empire, has a population of about 10 million. So that gives us a range of 5-10 million, based on these specific examples.


On the other hand, it seems that each Side has more colonies than the original series proposal suggested. In Victory Gundam, Side 2's Zanscare Empire consists of about 80 colonies; in Zeta Gundam, when Reccoa infiltrates the Jupitris, she claims to be from "Side 2, Colony 85" and nobody seems surprised.

It's possible that Side 2 is extra-large, or that a neighboring Side's colonies were merged into it after the One Year War. But it's also possible that the average Side just has a lot more colonies, with fewer people in each, than the series proposal said.

In fact, in the prologue of the Gundam UC novels, the space colonization plan is described exactly thus:

Colonies of the same type are being successively constructed, and ultimately a group of 70 or 80 colonies will form a single Side... [...] With a single colony able to hold about 10 million people, the population of a single Side will be 700 or 800 million. [...] The present plan anticipates construction up to Side 6, and it's said that completing that much will take another 50 years. The anticipated capacity of all the colonies will be about 5 billion. With a current total population of 9 billion, and allowing for the rate of population growth over the next 50 years, we can calculate that roughly half the total population will have become space colonists.

Even if we're rating published sources above the animation, this detailed account in the Gundam UC novels is surely a pretty credible published source; the fact that it exactly matches the evidence we're given in the animation is a nice bonus.

-- Mark

[Gelgoog Jager]

okay, 36 million per colony is way over crowded, the original Island 3 plan(O'Neil's proposal) called for 10 million, and Gundam somehow used the figure of 30 million for closed types, 36 million is, well, quite impossible to sustain.(Air and water circulation wise)

Being perfectly honest, I don't know if a closed-type colony has or not the resources to hold that much people. In this case I simply showed the highest figure which the author of that site seems to still consider possible to live in one such colony.

Mahal was chosen because it housed people that moved to Zeon shortly before the war broke out, and people there got little respect from the Zerks, that is how Gihren chose Mahal, not because it's less populated.

I haven't heard about this before. I'm not saying you are lying, but could you please provide a source for this information? All I have heard about Mahal, is that it was the home colony of much of Cima's crew and that it had a population of 6.5 million.

A country sanctioned from the rest of the world, in hash conditions and separated from the rest of the world, even with secret supplies, it would be quite hard to maintain its full population, especially when it is quite over crowded.

I don't think the economic sanctions would go as far as directly affect the water and minimum food supply required to sustain Side 3's population. Actually I would be more of the opnion that the economic sanctions might have been more oriented towards preventing Zeon obtaining materials and technology which they could use to build up military forces (which they ended up obtaining anyway through Side 6).

Side 3 was over populated possibly because of the colony reform and EF moving people to side 3 to lessen the hatred and control the people. There's quite a lot of deaths during the war, even accounting for the post war baby boom, it's hard to get the side over populated without external sources.

I think the biggest problem is that we don't exactly how the population increased again from the end of the OYW to the mid 90's, when CCA and UC seem to indicate that the most of the lost population has been recovered. However an extremely overpopulated Side 3 could provide a source for the additional population needed to reach such high figures:

Since we never actually see an Island-3 colony at Side 3, maybe we could assume that the Federation's Colony Reclamation Project involved not only repopulating the Island-3 colonies with the overpopulation from Side 3, but also to move them back to the unpopulated Sides.

The same site has another article about open-type colonies, which indeed considers the that the scenario of having more colonies:

If each Side contained a hundred open type colonies, a population density of ten million per colony yields the requisite billion per Side. A hundred closed type colonies with twenty million people each would yield the requisite two billion for Side 3. The highest number of colonies ever given for a Side is eighty-five (Side 2 in UC 0087), but that just tells us that the top end is at least eighty-five.

If eighty-five is actually in the mid-range, the top end could easily be up to 150 colonies per Side, with populations of 6.67 million apiece. Population estimates of three to ten million per open type colony and six to twenty million per closed type colony are therefore most probably correct.

The author does indeed considers that possibility of having far more colonies per side and how these larger figures could allow a Side to reach the expected population figures with a lower population per colony.

In my previous post I metnioned the 36 million figure to exemplify the overcrowding problem that may have resulted resulted in the Colony Reclamation Project. This amount should be considered the maximum amount of people that should be allowed to inhabit closed-type colony, but by no means should be considered an acceptable population, particularly considering the disadvantages of this type of colony:

The closed type colony is twice as efficient as the open type—but only a third as pleasant. Due to the visual and psychological effects of its undifferentiated design, the closed type colony seems much more confined and artificial, less spacious and congenial, than its open type counterpart.

Finally, is there any new information about Side 5's population and number of colonies? It was suppsoed to be the most populated Side, with 80 colonies planned, but supposedly onlya round half of these were completed.

It is also interesting to note that maybe the federation intended to relocate the colonists in equal proportions to each of the Lagrange Points around the moon, resulting in:

-Setting two Sides with 1 billion population each on both on L4 and L5.
-One Side with technically double capacity closed type colonies on L2.
-A single large Side with twice as many colonies on L1.

A simple way of seeing this is that each Lagrange point, excluding L3 (Side 7), would have a population of somewhere between 1.5 and 2 billion people each.

[MythSearcher]

The figure of 36 million per colony, which is often bandied about in Gundam publications, is another tidbit from the original series proposal:

One Side is made up of 36 to 40 colonies. With 36 million people in each colony, 1.3 billion people can inhabit a single Side.

In practice, every population figure we've been given in the animation or in Tomino's novels is far smaller. I already mentioned the figure of 6.5 million for the Zeon colony of Mahal. In Char's Counterattack, Amuro says that Londenion is an old colony with a population of about 5 million. And in Tomino's Victory Gundam novels, we're told that Amelia, the capital colony of the Zanscare Empire, has a population of about 10 million. So that gives us a range of 5-10 million, based on these specific examples.


On the other hand, it seems that each Side has more colonies than the original series proposal suggested. In Victory Gundam, Side 2's Zanscare Empire consists of about 80 colonies; in Zeta Gundam, when Reccoa infiltrates the Jupitris, she claims to be from "Side 2, Colony 85" and nobody seems surprised.

It's possible that Side 2 is extra-large, or that a neighboring Side's colonies were merged into it after the One Year War. But it's also possible that the average Side just has a lot more colonies, with fewer people in each, than the series proposal said.

In fact, in the prologue of the Gundam UC novels, the space colonization plan is described exactly thus:

Colonies of the same type are being successively constructed, and ultimately a group of 70 or 80 colonies will form a single Side... [...] With a single colony able to hold about 10 million people, the population of a single Side will be 700 or 800 million. [...] The present plan anticipates construction up to Side 6, and it's said that completing that much will take another 50 years. The anticipated capacity of all the colonies will be about 5 billion. With a current total population of 9 billion, and allowing for the rate of population growth over the next 50 years, we can calculate that roughly half the total population will have become space colonists.

Even if we're rating published sources above the animation, this detailed account in the Gundam UC novels is surely a pretty credible published source; the fact that it exactly matches the evidence we're given in the animation is a nice bonus.

-- Mark

Well... I don't see this figure too often, in fact, I never saw this figure in the books I have.
while Gundam Century give me the original real life number of 10 mil in Gundam Science, the "MS Strategy Analysis" gives the number of 60mil.

Probably the second information book, Gundam SF World, gave me a figure of 1 mil per island 3, but this is probably a misprint.

The earliest number of 20~25 mil per colony might have been from the Rapport Deluxe book ISBN4-89799-295-8, it gives the number of 10 mil, stating it is the original plan, but the island 3 in Gundam better utilizes the space and can have a maximum of 30 mil in theory, but in reality, they only have about 25 mil max. This was published in 1991 and republished in 1998.

Also from Rapport Deluxe, Mobile Suit Gundam Universal Century Vol. 1 History gives 50 mil per colony in Side 3, but 25 mil in other sides, but with maximum of 30 mil and 60 mil. And gives the maximum possible number of people in each side being Side 1, 2, 4, 6 having 1 bil and 3, 5 having 2 bil.(with side 3 having close type colonies and side 5 with double number of bunches to 80 colony)

I checked Gundam Officials, which gave a much higher number , saying the Open type can house a maximum of 20~25 mil, and the close type is double of that since it got double living area, which is 50 mil, but this is seldom the case since it will be too crowded and give people bad impression. It even further states that its just a simple deduction multiplying 40 colonies with the number of 20~25 mil to get a population of 800~1000 mil per side, while a few paragraph earlier, something about some colonies are resort colonies, so one can assume those are not that populated.
The Encyclopaedia of Gundam Ver. 1.5 gives the same 20~25 and 50 mil numbers.
The problem here is that Gundam Officials also states the Island 3s in UC are not all the same size, some are as short as 32km(original version), and some are as long as 45km.

The EB Bible Mechanic File did not give numbers.

Further information about population in colonies are not maxed out is from Zeta, 30 Bunch colony, which is a full blown island 3, only 3 mil people was killed by the G3 gas, so there are colonies with very little people(as compared with the 20~25 mil figure)

The now defunct gundamofficial.com site did not give the number for a single colony, but stated a Side contained 35~40 colonies and house 1 bil or more people.
http://web.archive.org/web/201206160719 ... pacecolony

I also looked at books like "Gundam and World War II", "Universal Century's Politics and Economy".

I did try my best to find the 36 mil number to no prevail.
Even the Japanese wikipedia uses these numbers:

漫画『機動戦士ガンダム THE ORIGIN』では、1つのサイドで1億2000万人前後の人口とされている。また劇場版『機動戦士ガンダムIII めぐりあい宇宙篇』では、サイド3の総人口が1億5000万人と語られている。しかし、ラポート社の『機動戦士ガンダム 宇宙世紀vol.1 歴史編』などの設定資料では、1つのサイドで10億人、サイド3, 5のみ20億人とする説が取られている。
なお、シリンダー型コロニー1基の人口についても300万人という説や1500万人という説がある。

Jist is 120 mil per side in ORIGIN, FG movie III gives 150 mil in side 3, Rapport co. is what I stated above.

I haven't heard about this before. I'm not saying you are lying, but could you please provide a source for this information? All I have heard about Mahal, is that it was the home colony of much of Cima's crew and that it had a population of 6.5 million.

Cima and her crew members are those kind of people.

Gundam Officials also states Mahal is an industrial colony, and it accepts a lot of illegal immigrants for its work force, and it specifically states that Mahal was chosen not because it is located at the edge of Side 3, but because its population composition. Also, it said the population is 1.5 mil.

I don't think the economic sanctions would go as far as directly affect the water and minimum food supply required to sustain Side 3's population. Actually I would be more of the opnion that the economic sanctions might have been more oriented towards preventing Zeon obtaining materials and technology which they could use to build up military forces (which they ended up obtaining anyway through Side 6).

The problem is the sanctions likely did not consider the increase of population in Side 3, and just like stated in the above, they have illegal immigrants.

I think the biggest problem is that we don't exactly how the population increased again from the end of the OYW to the mid 90's, when CCA and UC seem to indicate that the most of the lost population has been recovered. However an extremely overpopulated Side 3 could provide a source for the additional population needed to reach such high figures:

Since we never actually see an Island-3 colony at Side 3, maybe we could assume that the Federation's Colony Reclamation Project involved not only repopulating the Island-3 colonies with the overpopulation from Side 3, but also to move them back to the unpopulated Sides.

I'm quite sure they also moved people away from Side 3 as well. Side 1, 2, 4, 5 needed a lot of people to refill.

[toysdream]

Well... I don't see this figure too often, in fact, I never saw this figure in the books I have.

If you have Entertainment Bible 1, you'll find the 36 million-per-colony figure on page 88, at the very beginning of the "High Technology" section. That's literally the first book I picked up. on the next page, it multiplies this by 36-40 colonies per Side to get 1.3 billion people per Side, numbers taken verbatim from the original series proposal.

The Encyclopaedia of Gundam Ver. 1.5 gives the same 20~25 and 50 mil numbers.

I think this book's a pretty good source - it's written by Yuka Minakawa, who previously wrote Gundam Officials, so it represents the latest version of the author's view. Of course, Gundam Officials itself is largely a remix of previous sources, so Minakawa probably got these figures from the Rapport books in the first place.

Further information about population in colonies are not maxed out is from Zeta, 30 Bunch colony, which is a full blown island 3, only 3 mil people was killed by the G3 gas, so there are colonies with very little people(as compared with the 20~25 mil figure)

Ah, thanks for reminding me of that! On a related note, Newtype magazine's old timeline put the casualties from the Titans' gas attack on Side 2, Colony 21, at 8 million people.


On the whole, I think the figure of 25 million per colony (50 million for sealed colonies) proposed by Rapport and embraced by Minakawa is simply too high. Not only is this an awful lot of people to cram into one colony, but as we've established, we've never been given an example - in the animation, in the novels, or anywhere else - of a colony with more than 10 million people in it.

If we're trying to figure out where all these billions of people live in the Earth Sphere, the figures from the Gundam UC novels seem like the best guideline - better than the 30-year-old Rapport estimates, which require an absurd number of people per colony. The Gundam UC figures also mesh perfectly with all the information we've been given in the animation, which is supposedly Sunrise's preferred source.

As a side note, if we take Gundam UC's estimates as being typical for most Sides...

10 million per colony x 70-80 colonies per Side = 700-800 million per Side

And assume that Mahal is typical for Side 3...

6.5 million per colony x 40-50 colonies = about 300 million (twice what Gundam III tells us, but about 1/30 of the Federation population)

Then we can pretty much rule out overpopulation as a motive for Zeon's aggression against the other Sides. If anything, with twice the surface area and 2/3 the population, the Side 3 colonies would be much more spacious than usual.

-- Mark

[MythSearcher]

Well... I don't see this figure too often, in fact, I never saw this figure in the books I have.

If you have Entertainment Bible 1, you'll find the 36 million-per-colony figure on page 88, at the very beginning of the "High Technology" section. That's literally the first book I picked up. on the next page, it multiplies this by 36-40 colonies per Side to get 1.3 billion people per Side, numbers taken verbatim from the original series proposal.

The Encyclopaedia of Gundam Ver. 1.5 gives the same 20~25 and 50 mil numbers.

I think this book's a pretty good source - it's written by Yuka Minakawa, who previously wrote Gundam Officials, so it represents the latest version of the author's view. Of course, Gundam Officials itself is largely a remix of previous sources, so Minakawa probably got these figures from the Rapport books in the first place.

Further information about population in colonies are not maxed out is from Zeta, 30 Bunch colony, which is a full blown island 3, only 3 mil people was killed by the G3 gas, so there are colonies with very little people(as compared with the 20~25 mil figure)

Ah, thanks for reminding me of that! On a related note, Newtype magazine's old timeline put the casualties from the Titans' gas attack on Side 2, Colony 21, at 8 million people.


On the whole, I think the figure of 25 million per colony (50 million for sealed colonies) proposed by Rapport and embraced by Minakawa is simply too high. Not only is this an awful lot of people to cram into one colony, but as we've established, we've never been given an example - in the animation, in the novels, or anywhere else - of a colony with more than 10 million people in it.

If we're trying to figure out where all these billions of people live in the Earth Sphere, the figures from the Gundam UC novels seem like the best guideline - better than the 30-year-old Rapport estimates, which require an absurd number of people per colony. The Gundam UC figures also mesh perfectly with all the information we've been given in the animation, which is supposedly Sunrise's preferred source.

As a side note, if we take Gundam UC's estimates as being typical for most Sides...

10 million per colony x 70-80 colonies per Side = 700-800 million per Side

And assume that Mahal is typical for Side 3...

6.5 million per colony x 40-50 colonies = about 300 million (twice what Gundam III tells us, but about 1/30 of the Federation population)

Then we can pretty much rule out overpopulation as a motive for Zeon's aggression against the other Sides. If anything, with twice the surface area and 2/3 the population, the Side 3 colonies would be much more spacious than usual.

-- Mark

So the EB bible problem is that it contradicts itself...
I got the above info from Book 14.
Well, maybe not by much, we might be able to establish a number like this:
The maximum cap is 36 mil per open type, and double of that, 72 mil for closed type.
(EB bible 1)
However, due to different reasons, no one even tried to fill the colonies to that number.
(maybe its because of the original planning accounts for population growth but higher death rates made that pretty much impossible)
and just like current cities, you don't have a fixed number for all of the colonies, you get different number of population in each of them, and it various a lot, especially when you get resort colonies like the ones we see in FG, ZZ and Anaheim Journal.
And due to other reasons, people deemed colonies having a less maximum number of cap of 25-30 and 50-60 mil, e.g. some colonies are simply shorter, so the 36mil might be the 45km version, and the standard 32km ones have only 25 mil cap.
Anyway, we also get colonies that have very little people, like Mahal, with only 1.5 mil and 30 bunch, with only 3 mil.

Now, I myself puts the weight of canonicity in the following order:
Gundam Officials=Ver.1.5>=Anaheim Journal>Ascii Mediaworks publications(Bandai, MS encyclopaedia)=Sunrise publications=Model instructions detail info>=EB bible>Kakken>other whatever publications>Anime>>>>Manga=Novel>>>>Fact/Perfect file
However, I try to accept as much of them as possible.
(Other than the fact file, which got a lot of mistakes)
Gundam Century is a bit outdated and quite obviously most of the numbers are no longer in use, and its origin is not quite official, so I don't list it in.
Using this, an example will be the generator output for RX-78-2, which is normally listed as 1380kW,
but the MG manual also listed 12000HP for the core fighter, and 7 generators, so I will accept 1380kW is not the total output but a lowered output.(Rapport deluxe book said 65000HP)
That's entirely another topic though.

Using Sunrise preferred sources, anime, is not quite convincing enough because the current boss is Bandai(Sunrise is only a sub company now), so they got the power and say in these things.

However, my education background is engineering, so I just can't accept the ridiculously high pop number of 25+ mil per open type colony.
O'Neil designed these things to house 10 mil, the longer version should be linearly increase in pop number, where 45/32 ~= 14/10, so we should get a maximum of 14 mil pop in open types and 28 mil pop in close ones, tech advancements might give 16 and 32, no more.
Also, common sense tells me that you simply cannot fix a certain number of people in one colony when they can travel around. The ones that are managed better will have more people living in them, and those that ignore its pop will likely become places suitable for outlaws to stay and chase away normal people. So you get extreme numbers like 1.5 mil in Mahal and 10 mil in some others.
Also, we might also want to take into account of strange places like moon-moon.

Anyway, as we can kind come to a consenses of a 4.5~9 bil vs 15~30 mil pop, we can get back to the main topic of this thread, the production and deployment numbers.

[toysdream]

I've got to say, after working with on Gundam licensing and adaptation jobs for the last 15 years, it seems like Bandai is perfectly happy to give Sunrise ownership of the Gundam setting. Of course, it was Sunrise that vouched for Gundam Officials - it's "official" because Sunrise says so - so this creates the usual sort of paradox, where Sunrise is approving publications that contradict its own policy of "animation first."

On the other hand, "animation first" has the advantage of being a simple rule that saves us from arguing over which books we like best and what order we prefer to rank them in. As we've just re-established, 35 years of Gundam publications have given us a huge pile of incompatible and contradictory info, so there's always going to be an element of "choose your own setting" to deal with...


Incidentally, I just remembered another source of info on colony populations: Tomino's Gundam novels. In chapter 11 of the second volume, we're told that "Even a small colony represented 5 million people, and if it was a large one, 10 to 15 million people lived in a present-day colony." This accords with the population of Side 6's Balda colony, which is given as 10 million people. Of course, in the very next chapter Tomino tells us that 3 million people are being evacuated from Mahal, giving us a third estimate for this colony and establishing that Tomino's own novels aren't internally consistent!


And as a side note, if the spacenoid population is toward the lower end - about 5 billion total, as per the Gundam UC prologue - then a big chunk of the huge casualty figures we've seen attributed to the start of the One Year War would have to come from Earth. (We can't attribute 5-6 billion deaths to the spacenoid population if there were only 5 billion of them in the first place!) This supports the estimate of 2 billion casualties from the Operation British colony drop, as per Gundam Century and Entertainment Bible 1, rather than 200 million as per Entertainment Bible 39.

In fact, the smaller the space population, the more casualties we need to attribute to Operation British. Gundam The Origin, which as you note embraces the figure of 150 million for the Zeon population, features very small colony populations and says that the colony drop killed roughly half of the people on Earth!

Technically, yes, this is a digression from the original subject. But if Zeon only has the national strength of a modern-day nation (somewhere between modern Japan and the modern US), that surely factors into our analysis, and if the Federation lost a huge chunk of its own population in a single catastrophic colony drop then that gives them a massive handicap as well...

-- Mark

[ORegan]

PPS: tl;dr: How to make OYW numbers plausible/comparable to WW numbers?

I'm going to have to agree with Amuro's initial assessment, you simply can't. While the anime is irrefutably inspired by 'modern day' wars of the time, concepts like unit production, population of both sides military(not to mention civilians), and economy are either too difficult to compare, or just simply don't mesh together seamlessly. For game enjoyment, the less finicky you are about how absolute your figures for a made up universe with dodgy information at best are, the better.

For gameplay's sake, I would suggest the following:

-Focus your attention on WWII, and use the appropriate time period (Pre-war, early war etc.) to gather information such as unit production on armored vehicles, infantry, aircraft, etc.

-Find a preset scale number you wish to use for the OYW numbers. If you don't like the results, adjust according. If the numbers are way too skewered, which I assume they will when it comes to civilian population, you can pick a different scale number for each category, even faction specifics when it comes to military production.

-When it comes to the Destroyer class ships, lump them in with cruisers. Smaller ships can be mixed in with surveillance/tug/supply craft such as the Papau class.

- For MS numbers, I'd personally take a percentage of tanks and aircraft since the appearance of MS's reduced the amount of funds going towards the production of both. (as well as maybe even battleships, but don't kill yourself on the math.

For an example, if Operation Barbarossa's OYW equivalent had a scale of 1.5 for everything, you initially have this number.

6,000,000 personnel
6,000 tanks
6,000 aircraft
600,000 artillery

Now, to account for mobile suits, I'll just say that 3% of aircraft and 5% of tanks are converted into MS you have the following number

6,000,000 personnel
600,000 artillery
5,400 tanks
5,820 aircraft
480 mobile suits

Again, this is purely an example meant to make gameplay more streamlined, and you can scale the numbers as you see fit...after all, the books that actually give numbers seem to do the same.

[Gelgoog Jager]

Don't know how accurate it is, but I found this site showing a size and equipment comparison between the armies of the Principality of Zeon and the Earth Federation during the Battle of Odessa:

Original site in italian

Translated with google

The Battle of Odessa was the largest scale battle that took place on Earth, so I do hope that this figures (if correct) will allows us to make a good comparison to WWII.