Weight question?

[KH-NT]

I don't get it, why does all others Gundam average weight is around 20t-40t but the Gundam from Gundam Wing - G Gundam - Gundam X Series is just about 7t-8t? Because the technology is different?

[MythSearcher]

If you look at the UC timeline, the MSs are getting lighter and lighter by volume and a sudden drop can be seen in late UC(after UC0110) when they had turned to the smaller size MS. In UC0153, you can see the MS weight being similar to GWX series, and that is exactly why there series have such light weight, it was carried over.

The reason the weight gets lighter and lighter is likely because whoever wrote the specs don't have an engineering or science background, and thought simply that lighter means more advanced and didn't bother to calculate if those weights are reasonable or even possible.
In Turn A, specs are a mixed bag, and some even had lighter weight when in operation.(Gravity technology?)
For whatever reason, they turned back to more plausible weight since Gundam SEED(might also simply be they used back specs similar to the OYW)

But as you can see, no, it is not because the technology is different, just people gets lazy and picked specs they don't understand and changed or used them without doing their homework.

[Seto Kaiba]

I don't get it, why does all others Gundam average weight is around 20t-40t but the Gundam from Gundam Wing - G Gundam - Gundam X Series is just about 7t-8t? Because the technology is different?

Put simply, Sunrise was phoning Gundam in pretty heavily in the 90's... esp. Gundam Wing... and the stats reflect that general lack of effort or forethought.

The weights aren't the most absurd bit, by a long shot. The Wing Gundam and Wing Gundam Zero have a few items buried in their writeups that are literally impossible, mainly pertaining to the preposterous energy output of their buster rifles.

[MythSearcher]

Put simply, Sunrise was phoning Gundam in pretty heavily in the 90's... esp. Gundam Wing... and the stats reflect that general lack of effort or forethought.

The weights aren't the most absurd bit, by a long shot. The Wing Gundam and Wing Gundam Zero have a few items buried in their writeups that are literally impossible, mainly pertaining to the preposterous energy output of their buster rifles.

If they are using anti-matter as a power source(battery, not the projected particles), the energy output shouldn't be that impossible.
At least Tallgeese 3's MO-3 destroying shot is much more preposterous than destroying a ring colony in one shot.
I mean, a pretty much empty metal donut VS a semi solid chunk of metal reinforced as a military base and production plant?

[fahentai]

Well, trust me, most of the data from Gundam do not make too much sense.
In fact, about 15 years ago, in a chinese Gundam forum, some one has already estimulated (based on PG Wing Gundam zero model) that a full size gundam will be around 200 Ton even if it was made by plastic.

Btw, even if it was UC timeline, look at those miniaturized MS's data, you will found that they are very close to this number.

[MythSearcher]

Well, trust me, most of the data from Gundam do not make too much sense.
In fact, about 15 years ago, in a chinese Gundam forum, some one has already estimulated (based on PG Wing Gundam zero model) that a full size gundam will be around 200 Ton even if it was made by plastic.

Btw, even if it was UC timeline, look at those miniaturized MS's data, you will found that they are very close to this number.

The problem is if you make something that big out of plastic, because it does not have a high strength to weight ratio, you need to make it thicker and heavier.
And I highly suspect the estimation you are talking about just simply use the weight of the model and multiplying it by 216000 times. (60^3)
They probably didn't take into account that the plastic of the model is that thick because it cannot be scaled down due to the simple fact that a thin sheet of plastic will break very easily in any type of handling, a 1/60 scale model does not have 1/60 the thickness of the original because of that very reason, this is truth for real life military models like fighter jets as well. The actual F-18 wing material isn't 72 times the thickness of the 1/72 F-18 model's plastic thickness, yes, I have hold a piece of F-18's wing in one of our engineering classes. While most models gives you something like 1~2mm thick plastic, the F-18 wing is NOT 7.2cm thick, it is something like 4~5mm.
I have seen a lot of such post in Chinese myself and debunked many, but they just keep popping up since people have no idea of material science.

The weight for the OYW era MS are a direct 10^3 of an average human. Meaning a density of about 1.
It is not that absurd if you look at the size comparison:
https://truth.bahamut.com.tw/s01/201610 ... e821a7.JPG
Using the RX-78 as an example, you don't have much more surface material than the F-22, and the F-22 is packed with very little inner space.
The RX-78 is 43.4/60t, the F-22 is 19.7/38t Empty/Fully loaded.
So ignoring defensive armouring, a MS of this size should at least be able to reduce to something close to the F-22 weight, maybe even lighter if stronger materials are used.
Also, if you take the human body, in which 60% is water, the actual structural weight is 20kg for a 50kg person(I am around that weight at 1.75m) multiplying that by 1000, the empty weight of a 17.5m MS at about 20t is not completely unreasonable and is basically the same density as the dry weight of a human, given that the human body isn't really made of the strongest material, there's actually room for scrapping even more weight off. These are around the range of UC0087~0100 period MS density range for their empty weight.

This is not even taking into account magical materials commonly seen in the franchise, can these further reduce the weight to only 1/3 of this? It just like asking if you can make a whole balloon MS out of graphene, you can, just that it will be blown down if you have stronger winds and is not really practical even if you solve all the technical issues.