You're listening to season eight of mobile suit Breakdown, a weekly podcast covering the entirety of Sci-Fi mega franchise mobile suit Gundam, researching its influences, examining its themes, and discussing how each piece of the Gundam canon fits within the changing context in Japan and the world. From 1979 to today's is episode eight.
Point eleven, landscape of thorns, and we are your hosts. I'm Tom Gundam fan, and I'm the brain genius who decided to do a research piece all about fusion when my physics consultant is out in the woods somewhere eating trail mix and hiding from bears.
And I'm Nina, new to stardust memory and wondering if anyone has ever tried to explain to other Nina that if she is so afraid of her lovers coming to harm, maybe she should stop dating soldiers. Just a thought. Bubble Soup Breakdown is made possible by the support of 724 patrons and subscribers. Thank you all and special thanks to our newest supporters, Eric O. Mosquitoes and Izzy A. You keep us Genki a couple more special shoutouts this week. Thank you rabbit for the box full of goodies, Gundam related and otherwise. We love to get mail, so this really made our day. And thank you slice the light for supporting us on Kofi. They commented, quote can't wait until you get to victory Gundam. It is my guilty pleasure. I describe it as an enjoyable fever dream, which is a description that makes me excited for it.
Soon.
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This week. Stardust Memory episode eleven Rabian Rosu its english title is Lavia and Rose, which is the same as its original english title. And if you heard me say a few weeks ago that episode nine, the Nightmare of Solomon, was the only time in the series when the three titles all meant the same thing. No, you didn't. But this really is the last time. Anyway, it was released on June 20, 192. I've gotten a few questions about the original english titles, as a lot of fans have never actually seen them before. They appeared originally, and I think exclusively on the covers of the laserdisc version of 83 when it was released in 91 and 92. The chief director for episode eleven was Imanishi Takashi. The script was by Takahashi Ryoske, while Akane Kazuki drew the storyboards and directed the episode. The animation director was Osaka Hiroshi. Guest star Lucette was voiced by Katsuki Masoko, who played Rekua in Zetagundam. And now the recap.
The weaponized colony continues its journey toward the moon, escorted by the Delaze fleet, laughing to himself as he imagines the panic he's caused. At Federation headquarters, de las wonders what they will do. In a cavernous meeting room in Jaburo, politicians and military officials meet. They've received a list of demands from Delaz, and even if they didn't consider them unreasonable, several refuse to cave to his threats and hostage taking. Others worry about the political fallout if they fail to protect the moon. But the competo fleet is set to reach the colony well before it strikes. Once there, the colony's directional thrusters still have fuel and can be used to change its trajectory. Almost as an afterthought, they discuss what should be done about the Axis fleet and settle on treating them as neutral as long as they remain uninvolved. Even though the Axis fleet is not directly involved in the colony, Jack, they have their own part to play. Any remnants of the Delaz fleet who survive Operation Stardust will be sheltered and taken to safety by the access fleet. And they have one more contribution to make. They have brought a brand new mobile armor for Gato, the noya zil. Meanwhile, the Albion receives a chilly welcome at the Levian rose. Commander Nakato, escorted by armed guards, comes aboard to inform them that Admiral Cowan is no longer in charge of the gundam development program. The Albion is relieved of its search and destroy mission with new orders to guard the Levian rose and the unit three. Only Captain Sinefs, Lieutenant Cole Uraki, and Nina Purpleton are allowed onto the Levian rose itself while the rest of the crew remain confined to the Albion. Once aboard, they meet Lucette Audavi, a colleague and acquaintance of Nina's and lead engineer on the unit three. She's eager for Ko to test the face stronghold defense unit, but Nakato says he cannot allow it. The project is suspended indefinitely. Alone, with Nina drinking coffee in the ship's cafeteria, Lucette is openly angry about the delay. Her perfect machine needs to be properly tested, and Cole seems ideal. He already has test pilot experience and has a good grasp of mobile suit theory. She thought Nina would understand and is annoyed when Nina, hoping to keep Cole out of danger, makes excuses for why he shouldn't do it. The Federation fleet catches up with the stolen colony, having expected a quick and easy fight. They are not prepared for the destruction wreaked by Gato in his new mobile armor, and the massive machine destroys whole ships one after another. Lucete tries a different angle in her mission to have the units retested. She goes straight to Cole. He has just gotten out of a shower and is surprised if we see her, but she invites herself in, watching his reactions out of the corner of her eye. She sits next to him on the couch, leaning into him as she hands over a laptop displaying specs and other information about the unit three's design. Excited and curious, Cole seems like his old self, and Lucette capitalizes on his obvious interest. It may be against orders, but he came here because they need the unit three. He'll be using it to protect the Federation. His superiors may even thank him when all is said and done. Leaving, Lucette runs into Nina just outside the door, and, although Cole has not yet committed himself, tells Nina that he has agreed to pilot the unit three. Nina tries to talk him out of it, but he is tired of having this conversation with her and shuts the door in her face. With Gato keeping the competo fleet at bay, the stolen colony looms over von Braun City, and Shima calls the city representatives with an offer to save von Braun. They fire up the guidance lasers outside the port. The beams bounce off the colony's carefully angled mirrors, their energy serving to ignite the remaining fuel in the colony's thrusters. In a panic, the Federation fleet calculate the colony's new trajectory and find that it will slingshot around the moon, then head straight for earth. After chasing it this far, the ships of the fleet do not have enough fuel to follow, and their resupply ships are unlikely to arrive in time. This news makes its way to the Lavienne rose, and Lucette is quick to tell Cole, emphasizing that this is no time to hesitate. The two of them sneak into the unit three's hangar, but do not manage to launch before Nakato catches them. He authorizes the guards to shoot Cole. If the lieutenant resists the rest. Hurry. Lucette urges Cole, and he floats over to the unit three cockpit. Bullets fly. Lucette throws herself in their path. She protects Cole and is fatally wounded in the process. Horrified, Cole catches her calling for a doctor, while Nakato accuses him of using a civilian as a human shield. Just as Nakato steadies his gun to shoot Cole, Captain Synapse and other members of the Albion crew, armed to the teeth, take Nakato and the guards captive. Nina cradles Lucette as she dies, and Lucette confesses that she understands why Nina tried to keep Cole out of the fighting. Not only that Nina has feelings for Cole, but that years ago, Nina and Gato were lovers. I kept your secret. Please take care of the unit three afterwards. It's a race to ready Cole and the unit three, and once they launch, they fly straight to where Gato is still harrying the compato fleet. I want to get this out of the way. Very beginning of the talkback, Tom was right that any other in development Gundam would come with its own mommy. Beautiful engineer woman.
Its own Gundam mommy. And you were completely correct that Nina and Gato did have a relationship once upon a time. A good call based on some pretty scanty evidence. A few hints dropped here and there.
A relationship that seems to have left Nina with complicated feelings.
Yeah, she does not seem entirely over him, does she?
I sort of can't believe we only have two more episodes after this until the end. I feel like the end of this series really snuck up on me.
It is rushing towards us very quickly, and it seems like some of these story elements maybe could have been more present earlier on in the show, like in episode one. It sure does look like Nina and Gato see each other in the hangar right before he steals the Gundam. And yet there's no spark of recognition on either side.
And this in a show that does a lot with facial expressions, I don't always find the facial expressions that they draw very easy to read. I don't always know exactly what emotion it's meant to convey, but they put a lot of attention into having emotion in these faces and doing close ups of the faces as well. But given what you have found about the development of the project, it feels entirely plausible that they didn't decide to have that history between them until after the first episode had already been made.
Yeah, that does seem to be one of the conclusions one can draw from that. I mean, there are ways you could explain it away. The hangar was dark. He was wearing a federation uniform. They were kind of far apart. She wasn't expecting to see him there.
It's been three years. Maybe his hairstyle is totally different and it changes his appearance significantly.
He's been growing his hair out ever since they broke up. Well, we say it's been three years, although we don't actually know when they were together.
Lucette says three years ago.
Oh, does she? Yeah. Oh, okay, that's interesting. I think that contradicts the manga, but the manga's a retcon anyway, so thank you, Lucette, for giving us some numbers. So he's been growing his hair out for three years. It's also possible that the angles were wrong. She couldn't see him because of Minofsky particle interference in the hangar. I don't know. You can explain it away. It's certainly not fatal. But at the same time, it does seem like not everything was worked out all the way in advance. What complicates this, though, is that we know that the team making this had a couple of very clear instructions, some must haves from the top from the very beginning. And one of those was that they had to include a love triangle. So there was always going to be a love triangle. But that makes me wonder, was it always meant to be Nina ko gato?
Maybe it was meant to be koh Nina Lucette?
Maybe it was meant to be ko nina Mancha. And then people just didn't like Mancha because he's a reprehensible scumbag of a tengu. Not a compelling romantic option. They spend so much time on Mancha for, like, two episodes right after he first gets introduced. Did they think he was going to be a fan favorite?
Possibly.
Did they get a bunch of letters after those episodes came out that were like, no more Mancha? We are sick and tired of this guy.
I hope you realize the more you talk about Mancha as a tengu, the more I'm like, okay, forget all those serious research topics. I had planned. Time for fun, silly things like as much information as I can find about tengu in japanese folklore.
Yes, yes. My plot is coming to fruition.
This episode, though, is a bit light on the silliness. Lots of serious things happening, in particular politically.
When we watched this together for the first time, I think both of us yelled when the federation was like, here are Delaze's demands. And we're both like, okay, what are they? Are you going to show us the demands? What does he actually want? And the fact that they drop that line here, but never even hint at what Delaz is actually looking for, begins to feel deliberate.
Absolutely.
They are never going to tell us what Delaze actually hopes to accomplish with all of this.
My read on this situation, though, is that Delaz could be asking for almost literally anything and the federation wouldn't give it to him.
Also, I think Delaz himself doesn't want them to give him anything. We don't know what his agenda is. Maybe he actually does have some concrete things he wants to accomplish by doing this, but I suspect that whatever he sent them, his manifesto or whatever, is calculated to be rejected, he might be asking for, like, the dissolution of the earth Federation and for all of these guys to parade in public naked, spanking themselves or something, something so far beyond the pale that they would never agree to it, because all he wants to do is pull a shah's counterattack where he convinces them that he is somebody they understand and can reason with, when actually he just wants to drop a colony on them.
Really, wouldn't it be Shar pulling a delaze, since this is happening before? Sorry, this is funny to Tom and I, because this is a. I don't even want to call it a mistake, but it's a thing I've done where I talk about something in this show as deriving from CCA, even though chronologically within the universal century, it happened beforehand. But since they didn't come out in.
That order, I was so flummoxed when you started talking about the chronology, I didn't even know how to respond. It's like, who are you? What has happened to Nina?
But returning to your point about what Delaza's demands could ostensibly be and what it is he actually wants. The irrelevance of Delaz's demands, at least so far within this show that is almost over, makes me think about how many times common know, average, everyday pilots and soldiers have talked about vengeance, have talked about getting some of their own back and sticking it to the Federation for their loss. And is that all Delaze really wants? And he hides behind the mystique of, oh, I'm the man with a plan, like, I'm in charge, so clearly there's more to it. But is this all really just about punishing the federation for winning the one year war?
And his plan is very clever. He has a good plan. He is the man with the good plan. But it's a tactical plan. It's a good plan for an admiral to come up with. But it's not a government's plan. It's not a nation's plan.
It's a plan to drop a colony on earth. It's not a plan to achieve something for Xeon remnant society.
It's not a plan that will get rid of the hated Republic of Xeon. It's not a plan that will reclaim the homeland and find someplace for all these soldiers to live meaningful lives.
Negotiation is, however, a time honored stalling tactic.
Delaz resembles the shah's counterattack version of Shah in a couple of other ways, too, including his reliance on a single, very talented, completely devoted pilot who eats up everything he says and believes wholeheartedly in his nebulous ideology. That's right. I'm saying that Gato is the quest of 83, right down to getting himself stuck in a giant mobile armor for the end of it.
It's possible that one of the main differences between Delaz and Shar's counterattack era Shah is going to be that as the show continues, we're going to see a bit of mask off for Delaz. We're going to get some glimpses at that inner feeling behind all of this, which I think gets hinted at in this episode. Whereas Shar is, if you'll forgive the expression, because I can't think of a better one right now. High on his own supply, Sharp believes everything that he's telling these other people, or at least believes that when he's lying, it's a means to some higher end. I don't think Delaz has a similar level of self delusion. The hints at Maskoff that we seem to get in this episode are the moments when Delaz lets out a little bit of an evil laugh. He seems so calm and sedate and contained at various other points. There is not a lot of emotional expression from him, and when there is, it tends to be quite subdued. This is a lot more like naked emotion and, frankly, intensity of emotion than we've seen from him. Outside of the flashback where he stops Gato from going back out and fighting.
Himself to death, I do wonder if the source of the satisfaction that inspires Delaz to laugh like that is the anticipation of all the damage he's going to cause, all the people he's going to kill. Like if it's truly a kind of bond villain esque evil laugh, or if it's the satisfaction of a chess player who has beaten his opponent with a cunning gambit.
I lean more towards the ha ha. I have outsmarted them. Interpretation.
In which case, I mean, come on, my guy. It's like you're playing chess with babies when you play against the federation leadership. No one should be impressed by that.
You know what? I was impressed by?
What?
And it breaks my heart. They do so much to make Gato sympathetic. I really want to hate him. And then he'll do something that I respect, like the fact that the main reason that the Axis fleet is part of their plan is so that any of their own troops left alive at the end of this mission have somewhere to run. Axis is the life raft. In a way, Gato is getting his affairs in order, right? He's preparing for his death and attempting to make sure that the people that he is ostensibly responsible for will be taken care of in the event of his death. And it's good for Axis too. They get this fresh influx of population who are all trained, experienced veterans, hardened.
Soldiers familiar with the earth's fear, and.
With, if not identical, desires for the political situation, at least sympathetic ones.
Well, and more to the point, without their leadership, unless Delaz and Shima and Gato and their equivalents are also going to be escaping aboard this Axis fleet, probably. It's a whole lot of soldiers and not many rivals for power. It's a win win for Haman Khan. It's immediately after that scene that Gato obtains his mobile armor, the Noya zeal. And this is where he becomes the spirit of Xeon. He becomes the army unto himself. He is a one man regiment.
Yet another eventuality that the Federation fleet failed to consider. Although everyone seems to think of Axis as like Atlantis. So far away, so distant, so alien. Maybe it's not even real. And how on earth could people who you almost don't think are real build that kind of technology?
Well, people always say Atlantis holds all kinds of secret, ancient technology. It's funny how much of what happens here is contingent on Gato's success in the prior episode. Because had he not destroyed or disabled so much of the Federation fleet, they probably would have just wiped out the access fleet. Because during that meeting, the Federation leadership says, we can't afford to make new enemies right now. But a day ago, when they were so full of confidence, they probably would have know a third of their fleet to chase off the Axis interlopers.
Or would they have? Because if they understood Axis's potential capacity, if they understood that Axis had arrived carrying a brutally effective mobile armor, they wouldn't even be contemplating treating that fleet as neutral. That meeting feels so significant in terms of providing some insight into what's going on, even though none of it is a surprise. Right? We've seen Gundam before. We've seen Gundam's depictions of politicians before. But throughout this whole ova, I've had so many questions about the politics, and this is some of the most insight that they've given us.
I love to imagine the conversation that led to the design of that room. Hey, so we're building the headquarters, right? What kind of lighting do you think we should put in our big conference room? I'm thinking some kind of, like, desaturated, diffuse overhead light that's going to cast ominous shadows over all of our faces, emphasizing every wrinkle and making our skin kind of waxy and sallow, almost like we are statues of ourselves at a cut rate knockoff of Madame Tussad's wax museum.
Two scenes don't make a pattern, unfortunately, but there are two scenes in this episode that both incorporate a kind of central lighting or a smaller, well lit area surrounded by a kind of hazy darkness that fades into the edges of a room. In the case of this meeting, it's a cavernous space. It's massive.
Oh, yeah, and the furniture is massive too.
It feels like there ought to be stadium seating in the round around where their tables are, but you cannot actually see the full limits of the room. It's so dark around the edges that the room could end 3ft from the edge of the light. Or 30, and we can't tell.
I assume it's based on the UN Security Council chamber, but made much more ominous.
And we'll discuss this scene later. But I got similar vibes from the scene where Lucette barges into Cole's room to convince him to pilot the unit three.
We'll revisit that.
The room is dark. There's one lamp casting this kind of harsh overhead light on the two of them and then fading very quickly into dark blue gray. Haziness.
The federation council chamber, like the scale of it, the scale of the furniture, the scale of those massive display screens that are hanging over everything really conveys that these guys who are running the show are so unequal to the task. Like tiny little ants in a building made for giants, they are so unequal to the power they wield and to the dread burdens of their offices.
I thought you were going to go a completely different direction with that. I guess not completely different, but this is a room built for democracy, built for dozens of people, and instead there's fewer than one dozen that the federation wants to project this image of being a democratic government, but is in fact very concentrated in terms of who holds power, how many people hold power. It's more like an oligarchy than it is like a democracy.
A small coterie of professional soldiers and high ranking bureaucrats run the whole show, or do they even run it? The presence of this chamber suggests the inertia of the institution, the momentum that the federation just is a thing that keeps rolling along. And all of these people who attach themselves to it like parasites are just pretending to guide the ship.
There are a couple moments of compelling back and forth, even though they're very brief. One, they talk about civilian control using.
An english loan word, civilian, like they actually say civilian control.
And the reason for civilian control of a military force is to prevent corruption, to prevent military coups, or try to anyway, and to provide oversight so that you don't have these people who are heavily armed, extremely well resourced, and not answerable to anyone. However, the downside of that is that when it's politicians, politicians who are worried about the next election cycle, the concern about what to do, how to act, is guided by not what is the right thing to do for the most people. But how is this going to look when I am facing a political opponent at the ballot box in three months, six months, a year?
All of the guys in the room are on top of the world. Not literally, they are underground, but they are the people running the show of this vast worldwide institution. All they care about is protecting their personal power and position and minimizing disruptions to the status quo, to the harmony and stability of the earth sphere. And the nature of life is that disruptions are going to come up. So for them, it's about what can they do to lock things down and preserve their own power at all costs. It's like in history when the Tokugawa shoguns decided to close the country in order to prevent destabilizing outside influences from disrupting their own dominance over the local social system. So for these guys, it's not about the interests of the federation, the interests of the people of the federation. It's all about what is the least disruptive thing that can happen. From their perspective, the destruction of a major city on the moon is actually not a terribly big disruption. I mean, they just see it in terms of a spreadsheet. They see GDP, they see votes, they see the budget, expenditures.
There's that line about, I don't remember exactly what the character says, but it has a we don't negotiate with terrorists kind of vibe in that I think he says something about even if they destroy von Braun we wouldn't negotiate. We wouldn't give them what they're asking for. And then someone later makes a comment about, well, but we're all in agreement about the importance of the moon, which.
Is to say, it's not very important. Sidebar. I once had someone tell me that there's no sarcasm in Japanese, and I would encourage that person to watch this episode, because this episode is dripping with sarcasm at, like, every point. Anyway, for the guys in that room, something like the gundam development project, while it might seem like quite a small thing, has the potential to empower a rival, someone who is outside of the room at that moment, like Cowan or whoever his political patron is, because I assume Kawan is not the top of his.
Oh, you think that's why they shut down the development project? I was curious about that.
Yeah, that's my theory. I think the Gundam development project was probably an initiative run by Cowen and his group that had the potential to elevate them within the federation hierarchy. And for the guys who are already at the top, it's a zero sum game. Anybody else moves up, they have to move down. Now they have an opportunity, they have cover to just squash it. Somebody in that room might have even helped the unit two get stolen in the first place.
I mean, that I believe. I wonder about that rationale for scrapping the Gundam development project. Only because we have seen that Anaheim has a lot of independence within this society to do what they like and a lot of influence with various people. And Anaheim, of course, is being enriched by the Gundam development project. So they would want it to continue even if it was under someone else's supervision.
But the Gundam development project is such a tiny piece of Anaheim's overall operations. Like I noticed in this episode, there's Anaheim logo on some of the view screens, and I don't know if that's that they made the screens, they made the computers, or they made the software that it's rendering. But any way you slice it, as long as the Federation military is buying stuff, they're buying it from Anaheim. It doesn't need to be gundams. It could be gyms, it could be ships. Whatever it is, the Gundam development project is important for the specific people who work on it, but probably not the.
Company vis a vis Cowan. We have known from the beginning that Cowan is on the outs with a lot of his fellow federation admirals. He's on the fringe of things. His concerns and his priorities are not the concerns and priorities of the majority of this group. So he is an ideal scapegoat when things go wrong, because they aren't just taking away his pet project, they are also blaming him for theft of the unit too, blaming him for the bombing of the fleet. They're basically blaming everything that's gone wrong over the past few days on Cowan because he is one guy, and saying all of this is one guy's fault and we've removed him is very easy. Dealing with the fact that the entire admiralty has botched this horribly from day one, somewhat more difficult and uncomfortable.
Every organization large enough to have essentially like a will of its own to be thought of as an organic thing, its primary purpose is always self preservation, always. So the admiralty as an organization can never admit that itself is fundamentally flawed. And somebody like Kawen, who is within the system but seems to have kind of a reformist mentality and agenda, is always going to be a threat and an annoyance. And if it's a choice between him or them, they are always going to choose him. Presumably this military police officer, Nakaha Nakato, which is a fairly passable imitation of a tomino name, presumably he is within one of these other factions. He is the lackey of one of these other admirals. Is there any profession so consistently shown to be just a petty little bully, drunk on their own tyranny as the military police officer? There are shows and movies that make police officers look cool. There are shows and movies that make soldiers look cool. But has anyone ever tried to make a military police officer look cool? They're only ever there to show up.
And just like to throw their weight around. The classic stereotypical presentation of these kind of characters is that they love having power over other people and getting to use and abuse that power. They make him extremely hateable from the start. Something about his very smug facial expressions and slick back hair and the phrase I have to follow my orders, or I'm just following orders immediately sets off like a kind of alarm bell in the back of your head.
And the way he sneers when he does it, like me, oh, I'm just following orders.
But not a cool.
No, no, a terrible Mia, the dark side of me.
And the show portrays Nakato as the, er, example of this, the meta of this form, because in that sort of second to last scene of the episode, when Cole and Lucette are in the process of stealing the unit three, he is talking about executing Cole without trial. He blames Cole for Lucette throwing herself in the path of his bullet, although we need to talk about that later.
I have so much to say about Lucette. Don't worry.
But anyway, he's talking about how Cole has murdered a civilian and all of this other stuff. And in the background, one of his men, one of the security forces, has an expression on his face like he cannot believe what he's hearing. Even his own men are stunned and think that this is beyond the pale.
But not that any one of them would actually do anything about it.
They do surrender pretty easily, though. Pretty readily.
That's true. They don't really want to be there.
Related to Cowan being on the outs and the Albion arriving at the levee and rose, I think Synapse has had a plan for this kind of scenario for a long time.
Do you think that's why he's carrying the little, like, handheld walkie talkie?
I think that's why he's carrying the walkie talkie. I think that's why he's so calm throughout all of this and keeping everybody else calm, though.
He's just very calm in general. He's the calm center.
This is a pretty exceptional situation. They're committing a mutiny, and he seems pretty chill about committing a mutiny. But I suspect that because he has always known that he's serving under Cowan and Cowan is on the outs of everyone else, that there may come a point when he would have to choose between doing what he and Cowan think is necessary and what he's ordered to do. And he had already decided before all of this. Hence, no. Like a big, emotional, oh, gosh, what should I do? I'm so torn. He had already thought this through and already decided that if push came to shove, he was going to do what he and Cowan thought was necessary.
I think there's a good chance this plan is older and bigger and goes back to Cowan because we know the Albion. State of the art, brand new, top of the line federation ship. It's classified as an autonomous search and attack vessel. That was said in the previous episode. Synapse is an older, very experienced commander. The crew is all willing to go along with him in this mutiny. They have perhaps been selected for their willingness to do that. Is it mere coincidence that Moncha, Bate and Adel, three guys who seem to be allergic to authority, happen to be the replacement pilots who are attached to the Albion? This might be a ship that was entirely staffed by people Cowan knew he could rely on in case something happened?
Another point in favor of that theory. Keith mentions that their orders or agreement from Cowan are not perhaps, super official. What is the phrase he uses? Informal or consent?
Informal consent.
Informal consent, which means that Cowan has plausible deniability for anything they do. There's no written orders anywhere that say, I, Admiral Cowan, blah blah blah blah blah blah to you. Captain synapse provides a certain level of protection for Cowan and also for some of the people on the Albion.
And if everything had gone according to plan, the Albion would have two gundams, one of them equipped with a nuclear weapon. That's a pretty powerful ace to have up your sleeve.
There's considerable foreshadowing in this show that I am appreciating a lot. And in this episode, all the conflict aboard the Levienne Rose gets foreshadowed to some extent by this shot of the sort of command room of the La Vienne rose as the Albion is arriving. Because there's also this activity of people sitting at desks and consoles. And then in the foreground, so close to the camera that they are cut off, is a guard. You can only see maybe like a quarter of this person, but enough to see that they're holding a rifle and standing at attention over this space. And the inclusion of this guard feels as though it's foreshadowing the rest of the episode.
And likewise, when the Albion actually docks with the Levian rose, we see all of the docking arms clamp down around it, trapping it there. And I know that's just how the Levienne Rose works, but they do choose to emphasize showing us that the other.
Thing is, and this relates to how Anaheim connects to all of these plots and to the arrogance of the federation and their constant underestimating of Delaza's force. When the Albion left von Braun, we saw these little laser propulsion dealies on the surface of the moon that sort of help it get away from the city more slowly and provide it a little like energy or guidance boost. I think both before they turn on their main engines and they go. And those same lasers that provide that little boost are then used in concert with the colony's remaining mirrors to ignite its fuel source and slingshot it around the moon and towards earth.
I do love these machinations. It is a really clever plan that Delos has pulled off. It's nice to see that level of cunning in the ploys, that it's not just fly the two fleets at each other and shoot beams until somebody is dead.
The four men on von Braun that Shima is talking to, two of them look like they're trying really hard to hide smiles. And two of them look legitimately horrified. And I assume the two that look happy are Anaheim representatives who are in on the plan. So to speak. And the other two are local government officials.
They might also be Anaheim guys who don't know what's going on. Presumably this is a need to know kind of a thing. And the one in the middle, who's covering his mouth with his hands in order to avoid giving it all away is the guy that Shima was meeting with a couple of episodes ago.
Right. One of Mina's bosses, however many levels up that might be. But this leads into a question that I had, which is, why can't the Federation fleet refuel at the moon? They talk about waiting desperately for some supply ships to show up and resupply them. They're already at the moon. Does the moon not have any ability to refuel them?
Well, the moon might not have the ships necessary to go out to where they are and transfer the fuel over to them or might just not be prepared for it. They've already got a supply fleet on the way.
A supply fleet that nobody thinks can possibly get there in time. Feel like this is a requisition, some fuel, come up with a quick solution situation.
It would need to be so fast.
Yes.
Even, like, requisitioning all the available fuel is going to take time.
Yes. And the Federation does not seem to be great at thinking on their feet.
And maybe battleship class starship propellant is just, like, hard to get your hands on, not big stalks of it sitting around. Or maybe Delaz and Shima thought that far ahead and they made arrangements to delay the dispatch of any supplies from the moon.
One funny little detail from this part of the episode when the Federation figure out the new path of this colony, there's a diagram up on a screen and there is some text written in the roman Alphabet which I realized is actually romanized Japanese. And I believe it says something like, where will it land? I'm not going to tell you. It's a secret.
There's some actual english language text on the paper that seems to represent Delaz's demands that one of the Federation guys slams his hand down on. But of course, if you pause right before he does that and turn it upside down, you can read what's on it. At the top, it says something about, like, story digest. And then the front of the page is talking about the situation of the universal century leading into the one year war. It mentions that half of the human population lives in space. That side three declared itself the principality of Xeon and declared a war of independence, etc. Etc. Although for some reason, in the middle of it there are the names of three hotels in northern England. I don't know why they're there. Maybe somebody needed english text and was looking at a travel guide. But I like to imagine that among Delaze's various demands were the ownership of these three hotels. He's really into, like, english bed and breakfasts. Sorry, that was a bit of a digression. Before that, we were talking about the Levienne, Rose and Anaheim, which might mean that it's time to talk about Lucette.
There were times in this episode where I felt like I really understood her character and what she was doing and why and what they were trying to portray with her, and then times where I completely lost the thread. I'm not sure what's going on. I'm unsure of her motivations. So I'm hoping that by the time we are done talking about her, I'll have a better grasp on her character here.
The thing about Lucette. Lucette's role here is to play the temptress, the classic character type. Her job in the plot is to come in and disrupt the precarious harmony of the Ko and Nina relationship.
But she has her own goals, she has her own plans.
In a sense, her driving motivation is she wants to finish the testing on the unit three. Very similar to Nina in that way. She's devoted to her work, she's devoted to her mobile suit. She wants Ko's help getting it done because Nakato has dismissed her whole testing staff.
It's just really hard for me to understand, to grasp someone who is so hell bent on getting this piece of technology they developed tested immediately that they throw themselves in front of a bullet.
That's the temptress again. There's a whole, like, logic to this character type. There's a whole narrative machinery and architecture that she is beholden to.
So what you're saying is I have to stop thinking of her as an independent character with her own agency?
Yes, if you want to understand her.
But there are so many other things that she does within the episode that make sense and feel like they're in service to a character with her own wants, desires, plans.
But I think they also make sense within this framework I'm proposing starting just with her character design, comparing her to Nina. She's more overtly seductive. She wears red lipstick instead of pink, red earrings or pink earrings instead of blue ones. She's a little darker in her coloration. She's more angular. She wears her hair longer. She has all of these seductive glances.
The narrower eye, I think the sort of more heavily litted bedroom eyes and lots of sidelong glances and little smirks.
At people where Nina is earnest, heartfelt, sometimes agonized, at most coquettish, with an emphasis on the playful. Lucette is forward, and she's not afraid to use her sex appeal to influence Ko to do what she wants him to do.
I would say, in fact, that her lack of real feelings for Koh allow her to be more manipulative, as is.
Usually the case for the temptress type character. She's also happy when she's leaving Ko's room and runs into Nina on the way out to fudge the truth a little bit in order to make it seem that things between her and Kou have advanced farther than they actually have. Again, a very common thing for this type of character to do in order to sow chaos, disrupt the precarious harmony. And sowing chaos doesn't need to be her motivation as a character. It's not. It's just. That's her function in the narrative.
With all of the other test staff sent away, Cole is Lucette's only option. And if Nina won't share him, if Lucette cannot borrow Cole, Lucette has to take him. One of her more sincere moments, though, is her being openly appreciative and admiring of Koh's skill set, his qualities as a pilot, and his understanding of the mechanisms and the workings of these complicated mobile suits. Nina was always kind of cagey because she was in this position of having to choose who the test pilot was going to be, so she was never very complimentary of anyone limited to a field of one. Lucette is much more openly admiring.
Lucette's admiration for Co is reminiscent of what got Nina interested in him in the first place. But now it creates a really important contrast because Lucette is interested in him as a pilot and Nina now really wishes he would stop being a pilot. Nina is interested in him as Co, the person.
And in addition to compliments, Lucette uses pretty much every other tool that she can think of, every other angle of manipulation at her disposal, to convince Cole to work with her. When she shows up at his room and he's just been showering, she sits very close to him, basically leaning into him, and you can see her little, like, sidelong expressions at him, gauging his reactions to what little information she can show him and her proximity and the things she's saying. When he betrays his interest in these diagrams and this information, she thinks, oh, I've almost got him. She appeals to his vanity. She says, can you fly it? And of course, Colt wants to be. Of course I can fly it. I can fly anything. Well, it's your choice. I'm not going to order you what to do. I'm not going to try to control you like some people. And when he brings up orders, she mentions some true things and some not true. She says, you need this mobile armor right now, don't you?
True.
Oh, they'll probably thank you later. You're defending the federation. Completely false. And telling Nina that he has agreed doesn't just drive a wedge between Nina and Cole, but also kind of makes the decision for him in a way that might hem him in. Additionally, it prompts Nina to try to argue him out of it again, which he's clearly tired of listening to. He shuts a door in her face.
Yeah, well, it forces him to say either yes, she's right, or no, I'm not going to do it. So he can no longer be on the fence. And she has judged, I think, after their little intimate session here, that he is leaning towards doing it. And so she forces him to just take the plunge.
Here is my alternative read on. Her behavior, not a seductress, but a mom. Not to Cole, but to the unit three.
There is a moment where it feels like she's saying to Nina, like, my baby. You have to take care of my baby.
There are several moments when she expresses this intense anger about the cancellation of the project. She almost yells, the unit three is perfect. Like, my perfect baby is not going to be born because they have canceled this thing. Whether or not the unit three gets to be part of this specific battle is irrelevant. Nina, trying to justify her opposition, mumbles something about it could never get there in time anyway, so. And Lucette is like, did losing the unit one push you over the edge? You are not behaving rationally as an engineer, mommy. With this lens, we could say that the unit three is her unborn child and that until it gets out of the testing phase, until a real pilot uses it and puts it through its paces and it has experience of what it was designed for, what it was designed to do, it remains unborn. Her perfect child will never be if Cole doesn't take it out into space.
In the early episodes of this show, we talked a lot about the relationship dynamics and how it did seem like the contest to win Nina's heart was also the contest to win the Gundam, and that the interacting relationships between the engineers, who are all women, all of them, always the pilots, who are all men, and the mobile suits, is like the relationship between mother, father, child and.
This idea of women as a creative force and men a destructive or controlling one.
Or maybe the metaphor here is that the engineer is the mother. The mobile suit in its development stage is essentially like an unfertilized egg, and then the pilot is the father, and it's only between the two of them that they can actually bring it out into the world as a living child gundam.
And she knows that Nina understands this, which is why at the end, she can say, take care of the unit three for me. And it's why she throws herself in front of a bullet, because lots of mothers risk their lives for the safety of their child. She makes so much more sense with that lens than with the evil seductress getting off on her power, taking Cole away from Nina.
I never said the seductress was evil. And there's nothing that says a mommy can't be a seductress.
If she really wanted to sow chaos, she would have told everyone about Nina and Gato.
But she doesn't want to sow chaos for the sake of chaos. She's sowing chaos for the sake of her agenda.
Right. And what better way to drive Cole and Nina apart than to tell Cole that his current love interest used to be involved with his rival who just destroyed two thirds of the Federation fleet?
I think that's overkill for what she wants to accomplish, and I think the results of revealing that are unpredictable. She's confident that she can merely use her wiles and her appeal to get Ko to do it. She doesn't really want to hurt Nina. She just wants to take Ko away from her. Nina is a mother who has lost her child and no longer needs Ko. Lucette needs Kohl. And Lucette sacrificing herself at the end is one of the classic endings to the temptress story. Her design, all of her overt seductiveness, the way she lies and sows chaos, all of that has constructed her in the narrative role of the so called bad woman. And now, by sacrificing herself, she redeems herself, she restores harmony, and she permanently leaves the story. This is a very old way of telling this story.
We're going to have to agree to disagree on some of the nuances of all of this. I agree that she's a bad woman archetype. I disagree with the seductress archetype, and we both agree on the mommy archetype.
And then ultimately her final act is to demonstrate how good Nina is by giving Nina an opportunity to forgive her.
I don't know. She kind of buys that forgiveness by saying, I never told anyone your secret.
And just so that there's no doubt whatsoever, I like Lucette a lot. I'm pro mommy temptress. Good for her. We should have had more of her in the series. She should have survived and gone off on the Albion and continued to sow chaos. Small, fun chaos for us. As a treat, maybe she and Mancha could get together. That man is desperate for a Gundam.
For her part, after this incident, Nina jumps into serious engineer mode. She jumps into preparing the unit three to launch and preparing Cole to be ready to fly it. No more hesitancy, no more trying to convince him. And I do believe that a big part, perhaps the biggest part of her change in attitude hinges on Lucette's dying words and with being entrusted with this new Gundam baby.
And what a baby it is. But we'll need to talk more about that next week, once we've actually seen it in action.
Mora, overhearing this deathbed conversation and the expression on her face feels like it's. Like it's foreshadowing something she did not know about Gato and Nina. And now she does. The La Vien Rose director feels like a non entity. Like, why is she even here? In a way, she is Nina and Lucette's theoretical future, but there's so little to her, and she does all of nothing in this episode beyond introducing herself. That, yeah, I don't know what the point of her is.
So in double Zeta, you remember the character Emery ounce?
Yeah, of course.
Who was the deputy captain of the Levian Rose? The actual captain never appears. I kind of suspect my own little fan theory here is that this Kurena Haxel woman was the captain of the lovey and Rose in double Zeta, and we just never saw her. And Emery was her deputy?
Was or will be.
I mean, she's in charge of it now, isn't she? I don't know if she's the captain.
No, but I mean, does double Zeta happen before or after this? Chronologically after.
Are you going to keep doing this?
Yeah, probably. Did you notice that now Cole has become the quiet, stayed sensible one and Keith is the goofy, no filter?
Poor Keith. It feels like he's been reduced entirely to showing up to be briefly excited about something in front of Cole.
He gets excited about the unit three, and confused by Cole's lack of enthusiasm, he loses his head a little bit on learning about the cancellation of their previous mission. And then it took me a moment to recognize him, but he comes in right behind synapse at the end. I didn't recognize him because he's wearing a guard's helmet and his whole posture and everything is extremely exaggerated. Like, I'm a guard who just busted into this room.
Like machine gun.
Yeah, I'm pointing my gun at all these guys we captured. I enjoy his honest, reckless goofball energy. Some other shots that I really liked in this episode, they play around a bit with depth of field so that you have something in the foreground that is in focus and then a background that is out of focus. Both when the Albion is docking with the Levian rose, the Albion is in focus and closer foregrounded to the camera. The Levian rose behind is slightly out of focus. And then again, during the Gundam Jack, there's a moment when Lucette and Cole are in focus and the Gundam behind them is blurry. There's a close up of Nakato's face where the Gundam Jack is shown reflected in his glasses, but you can also see his eye twitching and the sweat on his face. And it's just really, really good.
Some very cool visuals.
They do a really excellent job of establishing sense of scale with the mobile armors by putting them next to these very large ships so you really understand how enormous they are.
There's a clever little match cut after the first time Gato takes the Noya zeal and shoots down at the Federation fleet below him. Then they go to the eye catch, which sort of messes it up. But after the eye catch, it's Koh's shower showering him with water. The same way Gato is showering the fleet with beams.
Yeah, it's almost exactly the same sort of shape of spray and lines. Coming down from a point is really good.
Ko emerges from that shower and you can tell from his expression that he has just been having one of those shower arguments, though I don't know if it was with Gato or with Nakato or with Mina.
And then at the very end of the episode, when Gato has just picked up that something for which they have no file is approaching him. He and the unit three, or possibly just him are in the foreground closer to us. But there's a shot of the colony and the earth. And because of the angle of the shot, they appear quite close to each other. We know they're not, but it establishes that the colony is already on its collision course. It has gone around the moon and it is headed toward the earth.
Now. I'm so glad you mentioned that because I noticed in the prior couple of episodes when the threat was to the moon, all of the establishing shots show the moon, not the earth. Now, in this episode, even before we find out about the trick that they've pulled, we start getting establishing shots of the earth again.
And what, 38 hours left counting down. And now, part two of Tom's research on the mark 82 fusion bomb.
Last week, I examined the Gundam unit two's atomic bazooka and the mark 82 fusion bomb it fired to figure out just how each was supposed to work. Now, as promised, I'm going to talk about everything that happens afterward, starting from the moment when the powerful lasers inside the bomb ignited its payload of fusion ready fuel. Let's return to the most basic, fundamental explanation of the fusion reaction. Atoms become so energized by heat and pressure that they strike each other and fuse together to form a larger, heavier atom. The mass of the resultant atom is less than the sum of the masses of the constituent atoms, and the leftover mass is converted into energy equal to the leftover mass times the speed of light squared. The mass for any single reaction is tiny, but the speed of light squared is enormous, so it calculates out to decent amounts of energy per reaction. The amount per reaction is determined by the type of particles, and the total energy released from the bomb is determined by the number of fusion reactions that take place before the system either runs out of fuel or loses too much heat or pressure. To generate fusion. In a reactor, the challenge is to limit the rate of reactions so that you produce enough energy to keep the reactions going with enough leftover to power the generators without letting it get out of control. One of the reasons a hypothetical fusion reactor would be safer than modern fission reactors is that a fusion reactor would rely on both a steady drip feed of fuel and energy pumped in from outside the reactor in order to trigger ignition, either of which could be stopped at the first sign of trouble. No fuel, no ignition, no reaction. In our case, the fuel in question is identified in the 83 novelization as ju suisso, Congo, Thai a heavy hydrogen mixture heavy hydrogen usually means the hydrogen isotope deuterium, which consists of one proton and one neutron and is thus heavier than the most common form of hydrogen proteum, which has only a single proton and no neutrons. The use of the term mixture to describe the fuel probably means that it also contains the even heavier hydrogen isotope tritium, consisting of one proton and two neutrons. Tritium is radioactive, and it has a short half life of just over twelve years, making it hard to get in sufficient quantities. But deuterium and tritium fuse at lower temperatures and produce more energy than in a deuterium deuterium reaction. So most real and theoretical fusion devices use the deuterium tritium, or dt fuel mixture. There's only about 20 tritium in the world now, but you can make it in a nuclear reactor, and the universal century has lots of those. So I think we can safely assume that the scientists of the universal century can produce whatever arbitrary amount of tritium they need. Tritium is unstable, and as it decays, it emits beta particles, a kind of charged ionizing radiation, but probably not in sufficient quantities to be significant for our purposes here. When deuterium and tritium fuse, the reaction combines two protons and three neutrons. The result is a helium nucleus with two protons and two neutrons, while the third free neutron is ejected at high speed and becomes what we call neutron radiation. When that neutron hits another atomic nucleus, a portion of its kinetic energy gets transferred into the obstacle, usually knocking it out of position as the neutron itself careens off in some other direction with somewhat less energy. You can sort of broadly imagine this like the breaking shot on a pool table, with the neutron acting as the cue ball. When we talk about the energy that is released by fusion, most of it is released in the form of the kinetic energy given to the fusion products, the helium nucleus and the leftover neutron, which we collectively call the daughter particles. And the neutron gets the lion's share of that energy. It's got so much energy that it starts out moving at 17.3% of the speed of light, or 52,000 km/second since heat is a measure of the kinetic energy of the atoms in a given system, the free neutron starts out very hot, and it cools down with each collision, while the atoms it strikes get hotter as they receive kinetic energy from the neutron. As the neutron slows or cools down, it might hit another atom and then stay there, getting absorbed into the nucleus in a process called neutron capture. The nucleus with the additional proton might split, but more often it becomes an isotope, usually an unstable radioactive one. If not absorbed, the neutron will, after about 14 minutes, decay and split into a proton, an electron and an antineutrino. In a hypothetical fusion reactor, these high energy neutrons would hit and even pass through the generator wall, heating it and the water running around the outside of the generator to cool it. Some of the water would heat up enough to produce steam, pushing the blades on a turbine, spinning an electromagnet inside a magnetic field, and finally producing usable electricity via induction in a bomb detonated in atmosphere, the neutrons hit the housing of the bomb, heating it up until it disintegrates and then hit the air itself, superheating it, causing it to expand outward rapidly in a devastating shockwave and producing the nuclear fireball and subsequent fire storm responsible for so much of the weapon's destructive power. The high energy neutrons don't just heat up whatever they hit. Imagine that you have a very tiny gun and you are shooting very tiny bullets at a wall. Each impact is going to produce heat, but it's also going to damage the wall, knocking the atoms in the wall out of position and leaving tiny little bullet holes in it. High energy neutrons do the same. And one of the main challenges in designing a fusion reactor is designing a reactor wall that can survive sustained neutron bombardment under the right circumstances. If a high energy neutron hits a heavy element like uranium, it can punch through the nucleus, triggering a fission reaction, which will then release more lower energy neutrons, potentially triggering other fission reactions. The key factor here is how much kinetic energy the neutron is carrying when it hits the nucleus. Different elements have different thresholds of energy necessary to trigger fusion. The most common naturally occurring uranium isotope, uranium 238, will only split if it's hit by a neutron with kinetic energy exceeding one megaelectron volt. The neutrons it releases during fission usually have energies below this threshold, meaning that it's not capable of setting off a selfsustaining chain reaction. On the other hand, weapons grade enriched uranium contains a large amount of the isotope uranium 235, which can be split by slower neutrons. Neutrons with energies as low as zero zero 2 neutrons released by deuterium tritium fusion carry 14 megaelectron volts. More energy is not necessarily more likely to trigger fission. But all of this means that they are well above the threshold necessary even in depleted uranium, and they will remain above it for some time, despite losing energy with each collision. This kind of fusion induced fission could be used to make a powerful hybrid type bomb, where the power from the fusion reaction is then magnified, possibly many times over, by secondary fission explosions. I've seen estimates that it could increase the power of each fusion reaction hundreds of times over, but it could also be used to dispose of nuclear waste from modern fission based power plants. The radioactive byproducts from fission reactors aren't useful for much, but they could be mixed with fissionable material and bombarded with high energy neutrons until they are transmuted into a much less dangerous material. The likelihood of a free neutron hitting a fissionable nucleus decreases as you get further from the epicenter of the explosion and the density of neutrons naturally falls. It is therefore possible, but not probable, that neutrons emitted by the bomb could trigger secondary fission explosions if they hit fissionable material on board the Federation warships that are gathered together for the naval review. These might, for example, be equipped with depleted uranium armor, which is a good material for use in armor and in armor piercing ammunition due to its extreme density. But going back to the high energy neutrons again, because they're very, very small and moving very, very fast, they will pass easily through most materials. Materials made from elements with low atomic numbers are more effective neutron blockers. So, for example, water is excellent, and concrete, which contains a lot of water, is pretty good. Spaceship armor, unless specifically designed to resist neutron radiation, is probably not very good at it. Now, lost in all of this are the electrons from the fuel. At the extraordinarily high energy levels necessary for fusion, the fuel atoms become ionized. Their electrons are stripped away, and they become positively charged ions. Those ions and the newly freed negatively charged electrons form a cloud of ionized and very, very hot gas, a plasma within which the fusion reactions occur. The new helium nuclei produced by deuterium tritium fusion are also positively charged. Two protons, no electrons. This two proton, two neutron, zero electron helium nucleus is known as an alpha particle or an alpha ray or alpha radiation because it has too fewer electrons than it needs. It is hungry, and it will eagerly strip the electrons from other atoms if given the opportunity. But alpha particles are relatively large and slow moving compared to other forms of ionizing radiation. They are unable to travel more than a few centimeters through the air, and they'll penetrate no more than a cell or two deep if they hit your skin. But on the other hand, if an alpha particle emitting substance like the isotope polonium 210 somehow gets inside your body, it will cause severe radiation poisoning. If you've ever heard people talk about polonium t or polonium poisoning, as in the 2006 assassination of russian dissident Alexander Litfinenko, it's the alpha particles emitted by the polonium that cause all the damage in our fusion reaction. The plasma is made up of electrically charged particles, the negatively charged electrons, ionized hydrogen isotopes from the deuterium tritium fuel that has not yet fused diverse ionized particles from the housing and other mechanisms of the bomb that were vaporized in the fusion reactions as well as the alpha particles produced by it. Because all of these particles are charged, they can be affected by electromagnetic fields. The free neutrons are electrically neutral and will pass right through magnetic fields. A hypothetical fusion reactor would take advantage of those properties by using a powerful magnetic field to confine the plasma in the center of the reactor, just floating there like the eye of sauron atop Baradur, while harvesting the energy coming from the neutrons that are shooting out in every direction.
I had to hold in a laugh so as not to interrupt you sneaky.
Nerd references the only thing nerdier than talking about fusion is explaining fusion with Lord of the rings references. The fusion occurring within the plasma contributes more energy to the plasma, but the system also loses energy via electromagnetic radiation, which you can think of as a stream of massless particles, photons traveling outward at the speed of light, each one carrying away a different amount of energy. Some portion of them have wavelengths within the visible spectrum, and our eyes experience those as light. Like all electromagnetic radiation, these photons transfer energy to whatever they hit, which we perceive as heat. Just as radiation from fusion in the sun warms our planet, and like neutrons, those photons steadily drop lower in the electromagnetic spectrum as they give away a bit of their energy to each atom they encounter. The plasma orb can also lose energy via conduction. If the particles that make up the plasma come into contact with other, lower energy atoms, they'll transfer a portion of their energy on contact. When the fusion reaction happens in atmosphere, the a plasma immediately comes into contact with the air and the ground, heating both via conduction. In space, the most significant recipients of conducted energy are going to be ships, mobile suits, or debris that happens to get engulfed in the plasma. The fusion, fission, and neutron capture reactions produced by the bomb all produce excited high energy nuclei, which then emit the extremely high energy photons that we call gamma rays or gamma radiation. Gamma rays that come into contact with other atoms can ionize them, stripping the electrons away and creating clouds of charged ions and free electrons. In the most famous high altitude nuclear test, codenamed starfish prime, the gamma rays from the explosion hit the upper atmosphere and ionized the air. The loosed electrons spiraled away along the lines of the earth's magnetic field, moving much faster than the positively charged atmospheric particles that they left behind. The separation of the charges created a transient but powerful pulse of electromagnetic radiation, an EMP that overloaded and damaged or destroyed electronic devices more than a thousand kilometers from the site of the blast. A powerful EMP might do a lot of damage to a fleet of warships, but the EMP effect was only possible because of the interactions between the bomb's gamma radiation. The atmosphere and the earth's magnetic field, two essential factors not present in the Sea of Solomon. We can hypothesize some kind of novel EMP effect produced by the interactions of gamma radiation on minofsky particles, but we can't really predict the effects of that. A second type of EMP, called a system generated EMP, can result if electronic systems are directly bombarded by gamma radiation, or xrays. This can create electrical fields within and on the surface of the system, potentially damaging it. But to quote from the textbook, the effects of nuclear weapons. Because of the complexity of the interactions that lead to the system generated EMP, the effects are difficult to predict, and they are usually determined by exposure to radiation pulses from a device designed to simulate the EMP radiation from a nuclear explosion. Thus, I can't actually say whether a system generated EMP would disable vital electronic systems on the shiny new ships of the Federation's main fleet. But I can observe that it would be typical for the Federation to skimp on testing and shielding because it shaves 0.5% off the cost of each battleship. And, I mean, come on, what are the chances that those disorganized xeon remnants are ever going to get their hands on a nuke? I flag this in particular because while we do see some ships utterly destroyed and plenty of wreckage after the blast, it's not actually clear what type of damage the nuclear attack did to the majority of the Federation fleet. We are told that two thirds of the fleet is too badly damaged to fight. But that could mean anything from reduced to atomic debris to a delicate and essential navigation system. Got fried, and it's going to take two weeks to get a new one from Anaheim. So those are the basic products of the fusion reaction that we should expect. A ball of superhot plasma made up of electrically charged particles, a spray of high energy neutrons, and electromagnetic radiation, including a lot of light and a lot of gamma rays. There might be an EMP, but in this environment, its effects are too hard to predict. I've talked a lot about specific mechanisms, different kinds of radiation and so on. But if we take a step back and look at this more conceptually, in both atmosphere and vacuum, when a fusion bomb explodes, the form of the danger is an emanation of energy. The difference in observed effect is determined by what absorbs that energy and how much energy it gets. As the recipient gains energy at the atomic level, it gets hotter at the macro level, and if it gets hot enough, we see the typical effects that we expect. Hot air, shockwave, fireball, firestorm ground soil goes flying crater forms metal vaporized fissionable elements like uranium potential secondary fission reactions person rapidly ceases to be a person in space, there are fewer things to absorb the energy, but the energy itself is the same, and it will keep going until it gets absorbed by something. The closer that something is, the larger portion of the energy it will absorb and the more it will be affected. That's the theory. Let's get empirical by looking at the observed phenomena of the starfish prime incident. Starfish prime was a 1962 us military test to see what would happen if you detonated a nuclear bomb above Earth's atmosphere. This was shortly after the discovery of the radioactive van Allen belts that encircled the globe. And part of the rationale for the test was just sort of to see what would happen if we messed with those proposed applications ranged from using high altitude nuclear detonations to disable incoming icbms, to maybe exploiting the flow of Earth's magnetic field to rain radiation down on the Soviet Union from a safe distance. There was also a lot of concern at the time about what the radiation in the Van Allen belts might do to astronauts on their way to the moon. This was a year after the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to orbit the planet. But both he and Alan Shepard, the American who followed him the following month, stayed well below the Van Allen belts. Some imagined that a nuke like starfish prime could blow a hole through the magnetosphere that we could then use for future space launches. The bomb, weighing 2200 pounds and carrying a one four megaton warhead, launched on July 1962 from an island near Hawaii. It was accompanied on its mission by a swarm of 27 escort rockets carrying cameras and other kinds of scientific recording apparatus, and was observed from monitoring points on navy vessels and nearby islands. The explosion occurred as planned, 400 km above the Pacific Ocean. There are declassified videos of the blast, and I'll link them in the show notes, but the best descriptions come from those on the ground who saw the event unfold. Quote a dense overcast extended the length of the eastern horizon to a height of five or eight degrees. At 900, a brilliant white flash burned through the clouds, rapidly changing to an expanding green ball of irradiance extending into the clear sky. Above the overcast. From its surface extruded great white fingers resembling cirostratus clouds, which rose to 40 degrees above the horizon in sweeping arcs, turning downward toward the poles and disappearing in seconds, to be replaced by spectacular concentric cirrus like rings moving out from the blast. At tremendous initial velocity finally stopping when the outermost ring was 50 degrees overhead. They did not disappear but persisted in a state of frozen stillness. All this occurred, I would judge, within 45 seconds. Another observer described it thusly. At zero time at Johnston, a white flash occurred, but as soon as one could remove his goggles, no intense light was present. A second after shot time, a mottled red disk was observed directly overhead and covered the sky along the magnetic north south line. Through the burst, a white yellow streak extended and grew to the north. From the near zenith, the width of the white streaked region grew from a few degrees at a few seconds to about five to ten degrees in 30 seconds. Growth of the auroral region to the north was by addition of new lines developing from west to east. The white yellow auroral streamers receded upward from the horizon to the north and grew to the south. And at about two minutes, the white yellow bands were still about ten degrees wide and extended mainly from near zenith to the south. By about two minutes, the red disc region had completely disappeared in the west and was rapidly fading on the eastern portion of the overhead disk. At 400 seconds, essentially all major visible phenomena had disappeared except for possibly some faint red glow along the north south line and on the horizon to the north. More succinctly, a reporter for the Hilo Tribune Herald wrote it looked as though the heavens had belched forth a new sun that flared briefly but long enough to set the sky on fire. This is consistent with what we were expecting, a brief and intense flash of light and other nonvisible electromagnetic radiation corresponding to the fusion reaction when the bomb exploded, immediately replaced by a rapidly expanding ball of plasma, which continued to emit visible radiation for some time. As it cooled, its rate of expansion visibly slowed and then stopped, a process that took about 45 seconds. It's worth remembering that the Mark 82 bomb used by Gato in his attack is probably orders of magnitude more powerful than the starfish prime warhead. Modern nuclear weapons using much less efficient fuels have achieved yields of around five kilotons of tnt for each kilogram of fuel. A 50 50 deuterium tritium mixture might get the same yield with no more than 60 grams of fuel.
Wow.
No one bothers to tell us the yield or the mass of the Mark 82 bomb, and it's probably not 100% efficient, but we can safely assume that it is an extremely powerful bomb. And now we get to the real meat of this investigation. The phenomena displayed in the show and whether or not we think they are a plausible depiction of a fusion bomb detonating in deep space, in the heart of a fleet of ships. Unfortunately, the show gets off to a bad start with the initial burst of light. What should be a single blinding flash is instead depicted as a globe of bright white light that expands over the course of about 7 seconds to engulf all of the Solomon sea sector. Light travels through the vacuum of space at a constant speed. Just under 300,000 is animated at 24 frames per second. So the light should travel twelve, 500 km, or the length of some 30 Birmingham class space battleships per frame. Suffice it to say that it does not do so.
And there's no indication from most of the animation of this scene that it's been slowed down or anything, because we get shots inside the cockpits of Keith, of Gato, of Cole, and it's not in slow motion.
It's a little hard to analyze because there are two expanding globes of light. The first one, which is probably meant to be the light, and the second one, which is probably meant to be the plasma. They depict them in a very similar way, but I think they're distinct phenomena and if we separate them out, I think it is possible that the light is being depicted in slow motion, but.
Then that the later part of the scene is not.
Yes, the second part is better because after the bloom of light, we do see some ships engulfed in an opaque globe of light. As this globe, the plasma field from the bomb, expands, we can see rays of light shining out from it. This is a nice, and I think, accurate touch because it distinguishes ever so subtly this light from the other light. And it shows that the extremely hot plasma is itself emitting quite a lot of radiation, including visible light. At this point we see three distinct cuts that show us what is happening inside the plasma sphere. The first, lasting 3 seconds, shows a large number of ships engulfed in plasma. Most are distant and indistinct due to the light, but the three nearest to the camera visibly disintegrate, starting from the outside until they're reduced to wreckage. Then the episode cuts to an interior shot of the Birmingham's bridge that lasts 5 seconds. As Wyatt delivers his final line, the radiance grows brighter, but we don't actually see his fate. The episode then cuts to the third scene showing the Birmingham and three nearby cruisers as they disintegrate in that same outside to in manner over the course of 3 seconds. In sequence, these three scenes take roughly 12 seconds, but I think that we should assume that they are actually happening simultaneously and that the whole thing only takes about 5 seconds at most. Recall that Gato targeted the Birmingham when he fired the atomic bazooka. I think it's reasonable to assume that the Birmingham was among the ships closest to the epicenter of the blast. All three scenes feature the same steadily growing luminosity which plays out over roughly the same time frame implying to me that all three are experiencing the same phenomena at the same time. We see them sequentially because the director declined to use picture in picture technology. Setting the timing aside, the actual mechanism of what's going on here seems simple enough. The intense heat from the plasma globe, which, although it is cooling rapidly as it expands would have started out at more than 100 million kelvins is melting and then vaporizing the ships and everything and everyone in them. The ships had also already been damaged by the blast of high energy neutrons that preceded the plasma globe. The neutrons striking the ship armor and bouncing around inside the ships imparted a great deal of energy to them, raising their temperature while knocking atoms out of position and disrupting the crystalline latice of the metal. One of the main effects of neutron bombardment that's been observed is that it makes metals more brittle, especially at higher temperatures. Higher energy neutrons cause more of this kind of damage. And the neutrons released by deuterium tritium fusion are about as high energy as they get. But whether the timescale is 3 seconds or 12 seconds, is it plausible that the bomb could convey enough energy into the ships to disintegrate them? How much energy would we even need to do that? Iron boils at a bit more than 3100 degrees kelvin. And it takes 450 joules to raise the temperature of a kilogram of iron by one degree. The temperature of space near Earth and in the Solomon Sea sector should be around 285 kelvins. So if you assume the iron starts out at that temperature, you would need about 1.27 million joules, or 1.27 megajoules, to vaporize a kilogram of iron. Or a thousand times that, 127 gigajoules to vaporize a metric ton of iron. The Birmingham is listed in data books at 88 and a half thousand tons. We don't know its exact composition, so parts of it likely boil at higher or lower temperatures than iron. But also many of its components will be starting out at higher temperatures than the 285 kelvin baseline of space. So for the sake of simplicity, let's assume that all of these factors cancel each other out and treat the ship like a solid lump of 88 and a half thousand tons of iron. In that case, it should take around 112,000 gigajoules of energy to vaporize the whole thing. 1 gram of deuterium tritium fuel can produce more than 2800 gigajoules, which means that roughly 40 grams of DT fuel could provide enough energy to annihilate the flagship. Other vessels, like the Salamis chai cruisers that make up the bulk of the fleet, are smaller and would require less energy. Because the energy emanates in all directions. Each ship absorbs only a fraction of the bomb's total energy. How much of a fraction will largely depend on how close the ships are to the blast. Imagine a sphere with a radius equal to the distance between the bomb and the ship. The ship covers some percentage of the surface area of that sphere, and it should absorb the same percentage of the bomb's total energy on release. All other things being equal, the smaller the radius, the larger the share of the energy. Unfortunately, we don't know where the bomb was when it went off, or how close any of these ships were. We don't know how much DT fuel was packed into it. A kilogram? A ton? Ten tons? More. But we do know that some of the destroyed ships were engulfed within the expanding plasma field. So let's now look at how the plasma itself contributes to this. I've said a couple of times that the plasma cools down after the explosion, and when I say this, I'm talking about three distinct processes. First, as the globe of plasma expands, the total amount of energy gets spread out over more and more space, and thus the average amount of energy in any cubic meter decreases. Second, when the plasma interacts with some other material, it conducts heat into that new substance. Those atoms heat up, and they may even heat up enough to become plasma themselves. But as the total number of particles in the cloud increases, the average kinetic energy per particle decreases. And then third, the hot plasma radiates energy out in every direction, which reduces the total amount of energy inside the cloud. You can't do much to stop the loss of energy through radiation, although it is worth remembering that all of that radiant energy is not wasted. It is also hitting the ships and contributing to their destruction. Photons, if you have enough of them, can disintegrate a warship all on their own. That's how first Gundam's colony laser and solar system worked. As for the plasma cloud's expansion, there is a method to confine it, keeping it smaller, denser, and hotter for longer, doing more damage in a concentrated area. Because the plasma is made up of charged particles, it can be confined by a magnetic field. That's the principle behind magnetic confinement fusion reactors, like the one being developed at the international Thermonuclear Experimental reactor facility in southern France. But plasma can also generate and be confined within its own magnetic fields. This is a major avenue of research for nuclear physics, because it could make magnetic confinement reactors far more efficient. We're a long way from being able to create a self confined plasma on the scale of the one that engulfed the naval review. But there is every reason to believe it's possible. In fact, in 2013, a professor at the University of Missouri managed to generate a small, intensely hot ring of self confining plasma in open air and with relatively simple equipment. It only lasted ten milliseconds, or less than one frame of animation. But that's more than nine milliseconds longer than it should have lasted, without some kind of self confining effect. Modern ideas for self confining plasma require it to be in certain shapes, usually toroidal or kind of ring shaped. And the plasma we see in the show doesn't resemble that. But maybe they have some kind of future magnetic confinement going on. The scientists of the universal century understand nuclear fusion a lot better than we do today. So I think it's safe to assume that they've mastered plasma physics, too. Self confined plasmas might even help explain how beam weapons work. But that's a question for another time. For now, suffice it to say that using a self confined plasma could make the fusion bomb more efficient and more powerful than it would be otherwise. One of the major difficulties in designing a nuclear weapon is that you're relying on many, many reactions, fusion or fission, taking place over a very short time period, with each individual reaction producing only a tiny fraction of the overall energy potential of the bomb's payload. You cannot make them all happen simultaneously. Getting nuclear reactions going is about probability. Forcing enough atoms of your fuel into a situation where they are likely to start fusing or splitting, and then hoping that they will. Once they start, the products from the first reaction make others more likely, leading to a chain of reactions. In a fission bomb, each split atom produces multiple free neutrons that can trigger other atoms to split as well, so long as each fission reaction triggers an average of more than one secondary reaction. Boom. For this to work, though, the atoms have to be close together. Fusion is conceptually similar. The plasma needs to be hot so that the particles inside it are moving fast. But it also needs to be dense to increase the chances of two fuel atoms colliding. And it needs to be confined for a sufficient period of time to allow all of this to happen. Each fusion reaction increases the energy within the system, making subsequent reactions more likely, but only so long as you can maintain that tight density. In both types of nuclear reaction, the increasing energy from the reactions creates outward pressure. The fuel rapidly expands, it's blown to smithereens by the explosion, and suddenly the density is too low to sustain further reactions. Thus, when the little boy bomb exploded, it produced about 15 kilotons of energy. But that energy release came from the fission of less than 2% of the 64 uranium that were packed into the bomb. The rest was wasted. Real world nuclear bombs use a tamper, a layer of material usually very dense, to slow down the thermal expansion of the fuel and redirect outbound energy back into the fuel, allowing more of it to react and producing a larger, longer lasting, and more powerful explosion. But no tamper is completely effective. Some percentage of your fuel is just not going to detonate. A selfgenerated magnetic field could work like a tamper for a fusion bomb, maintaining the necessary plasma density for a longer time and thus allowing more of the fuel to fuse. In 1997, the writer Nagase Tadashi, a contributor to Gundam Century and the science consultant for Zeta Gundam, wrote several articles about the science of Gundam, including two that touch on the mark 82 bomb. While Nagase didn't work directly on 83, and there's no indication that Imanishi consulted with him on this description of the bomb, I think Nagase's bona fides as a science fiction writer and Gundam luminary make his work on the subject worthy of our consideration. According to Nagase, the warhead is self confining. It contains a layer of minofsky particles wrapped around the payload. The powerful magnetic field generated by the nuclear reaction keeps the Minovsky particles in position, and in turn, they confine the plasma, sustaining a coherent sphere of destruction for long enough to annihilate some ships and do serious damage to most of the rest of the fleet. The remaining two phenomena are simpler to explain. After the annihilation of the Birmingham, we see a shot of the unit two itself being buffeted by debris, washed over by brilliant light, and surrounded by some kind of vaporous cloud. The strong but not blinding light is probably radiating from the hot plasma. The debris, though it may seem to be driven by magical space wind, was probably just launched from secondary explosions on ships that were damaged but not totally disintegrated by the bomb. The cloud of gas is either a special coating on the surface of the unit two's armor dissolving or its exhaust from the shield's dedicated cooling system. The same one that Koa damaged back in episode two. Or it's both. I can't think of any good reason why it would be streaming away behind the unit two, though. Solar wind? Minofsky particles? Magnetism, some kind of news type something. Or maybe Gato saw the bright light and flew toward the explosion because he has the survival instincts of a moth. Anyway, the last one is the easiest of all. Cole and Keith see a bright light in the distance that lasts for 20 seconds before fading away. That's got to be radiation from the hot plasma. And it is entirely consistent with the reports from starfish prime. All in all, as I see it, there are a couple of mistakes, a few compromises to the necessities of cinema. And the scale of destruction is probably less than was implied by the line. Two thirds of our ships are out of action. Most of the ships were probably knocked out, but not actually destroyed. But the destruction actually shown on screen seems entirely plausible if we allow for an arbitrarily large deuterium tritium based pure fusion bomb with or without the added benefit of Minofsky confinement. What bugs me is that this is like the one scenario where such an overpowered bomb would be useful. Real world armies don't build super bombs like this one anymore because they're stupidly expensive, they're finicky, and you can achieve your actual objectives just as well with smaller, cheaper bombs. No target needs 50 megatons of bomb. And if you did need that much power, it would be simpler just to use ten five megaton bombs. A bomb of the kind we're seeing here would be wasted on a colony or a city and nearly useless against a fleet in maneuver or battle formation. What possible use case did they have in mind when they built this bomb? But, hey, this is the Federation brass we're talking about. Gross incompetence at the top is their baseline.
I assume somebody got paid a lot of money to make it Quibono. That's who benefits.
If I had to speculate about an actual reason why the Federation might have built a bomb this powerful, maybe it's just pure intimidation. Maybe they just wanted to have the biggest possible gun because they thought that that would keep people in line.
Next time on episode eight point twelve. The center of danger is here. We research and discuss Gundam 83, stardust memory, episode twelve, and the gravity of the situation. Skinhead octopus. The time for discussion has passed. Says man who has never once changed his mind. Hey, that's from Sun Tzu conducting the symphony of battle. Everyone knows that sitting at your desk stroking a cat is villain coded. Shut it, old man. God is my witness, I'll never be powerless again. Military grade stimulants, space math. Delaze makes a huge, tiny mistake. The tip of a broken spear. And it was always going to end this way. The danger is still present in your time, as it was in ours.
Mobile suit breakdown is written, recorded and produced by us, Tom and Nina, in scenic New York City within the ancestral and unceded land of the lenape people and made possible by listeners like you. The opening track is wasp by Misha Dioxin. The closing music is long way home by spinning ratio. The recap music for this season is 80s synth rock guitar improvisation by zombie Fish. You can find links to the sources for our research, the music used in the episode, additional information about the lenape people, and more in the show notes, and on our website, gundampodcast.com. You can get in touch with us on Twitter or Instagram at gundampodcast or by email to hosts@gundampodcast.com. And thank you for listening. The wrong Gundam opinion this week comes from an anonymous Transformers fan who got lost and wandered into our Gundam server. And it's that the Mark 82 bomb should have been codenamed the Gaston because nothing and no one devastates a fleet like Gaston with all of the different versions of the katamari orb that you get in. We love katamari. They could have done a chicken one roll up things a chicken would eat.
Or just roll up chickens.
Would that be like the bear and cow levels, though, where you're trying to get the biggest chicken going on?
Oh, there's a march across the street.
All right, well, I think I'm just going to keep going and if it turns out I have to rerecord some of this stuff, I can't. And that's it.
That's great. It was really good.
Thank you. It's like an hour long.
Oh, good God.
The recording is 52 minutes. You. How often does that train go by?
So often you won't notice. Except we've had that conversation. We've had people visit us into this apartment and be like, what is that? Oh, this is a train.
I've got some funny things to say. I've got some serious things to say. I've got some things to say that are about the show but are really about the world.
A bit clumsy segue, but it works. Oh, I probably can't. Should I say that?
Probably not. I got you, though.
I don't think I can say that.
No, you can't. You've committed to the bit. I thought I was the one who committed to the bite. Think we're. Think we're safe. We are unlikely to get angry emails about that one. Nothing will stop. Nothing will. No, you're right. Nothing will stop people from sending us angry emails.