Gandalf Wearing White Trainers Is Also Pretty Rad. Also Props To Whoever Played Gollum.

Gandalf wearing white trainers is also pretty rad. Also props to whoever played Gollum.

Alright, since I did a post on all the Gundam Units running around in the One Year War, and since I also just finished my big long post on Gundam: Code Fairy, I should probably do one on the Pale Rider series, shouldn’t I?

Being that they’re also very popular, and thus show up in a lot of places. I should note that I’m working off second-hand information for most of these, since I haven’t played the Missing Link Games.

I’m also going to talk about the original pale rider first, then I’ll deal with the others in (in-universe) chronological order in a second post:

The Original RX-80 PR Pale Rider (later retconned into being the 4th unit in the Pale Rider plan). First appeared in the Mobile Suit Gundam Side Story: Missing Link videogame. It’s first known deployment was against the Slave Wraith Team, an Earth Federation MS team made up of condemned criminals, often used as an internal disciplinary unit (read: taking out traitors and political enemies of the group’s controller, Grave) after they were judged too much of a liability (betrayed). It was later heavily damaged in battle against Zeon’s Marchosias Corps (basically a bunch of pilots that Zeon doesn’t fully trust due to possible ties with the Earth Federation, but who are too good for Zeon not to use) and captured (along with its pilot) at a Baoa Qu, at the end of the war. What happens to it next depends, since the Videogame and Manga diverge here. In the videogame it is eventually refitted into the AMX-18 Todesritter by Neo Zeon (in UC 0090, around the time of Char’s Rebellion), which I’ll get to later. Whilst in the manga it’s customised into the Pale Rider (VG) in UC 0080, then used by Vincent Gleissner, former member of Marchosias, and fought against the Pale Rider Dullhan, which I’ll also get to later. The Pale Rider (VG) is stated to be repaired using Gelgoog parts, but really the only notable difference is it’s weaponry. Notably, the name Pale Rider is implied to be something of a sick joke - in normal mobile suits the Pilot controls their actions as if they were riding a horse, with the Pale Rider, it’s the other way around.

So there it is, the unit that started it all. While I do understand it’s popularity I confess I’m unable to really appreciate the design. Why is this? Well…. The original Pale Rider design could be described as taking a bunch of existing cool elements from the Gundam Sidestories and mashing them all together. While not a bad method of designing a suit (especially one that you want to feel threatening, or a culmination of that which came before it), it does mean that the design is going to have a certain stitched-together quality to it.

First off, the mobile suit itself takes several design cues from the GM Sniper II (some of the chest and most of the legs and skirt armour) stated to be one of the best suits in the war, and it equipped with a HADES system, a derivative of the (strictly-limited) EXAM system used by the Blue Destiny Units, from which it also appears to derive its head design and general colourscheme.

(I’ll talk about it another time, but the EXAM system is essentially a super mode, where the suits limiters are released, but it places incredible stress on the pilot, since they’re essentially being used as a biological cpu. It is limited to three minutes, otherwise the suit is put under too much stress).

Armament wise, it has multiple weapon loadouts, all of which use weaponry cribbed from other machines. The ground type armaments uses the same 180mm Cannon as the Gundam Ground Type, and is also equipped with a Spike Shield used by the GM Striker. Whilst the Space use version uses the exact same armaments as the Gundam G05 - Giant Gatling Gun, Hyper Beam Rifle, Shield and this is also where the Pale Rider gets it’s beam guns which are built-into it’s arms.

When customised for use by Vincent Gleissner, it’s equipped with the Beam Machine Gun from the Gelgoog Jäger (essentially the best beam weapon available at that time) in addition to its Beam spot guns in the arms, to replace it’s destroyed beam guns. It gets twin beam naginata’s from the standard Gelgoog, and has twin missile pods added to the legs (I assume they’re standard Zeon equipment, but the only other suit we see them on is the EXAM Efreet).

This isn’t meant to call out the Pale Rider as a “Bad Design” or anything. I think it does a good job of blending its influences together. It’s just that I generally find myself preferring it’s component units over it (particularly the G04 and G05).

I’ll talk about the other Rider units in a follow-up post.

Gino D’Achille

ghost of summer

watercolour on arches paper

It’s always surreal when you unfollow one person, and then 75% of your feed just up and vanishes.

Like, damn. I knew it was busy, but I didn’t expect it to be that unbalanced.

I’m just gonna pull out that side note about Gusion first, since I’d honestly just assumed that the Brewers (or another pirate group) had re-armoured it. It’s stated that it was recovered from a high density debris zone - there’s a lot of old Ahab reactors floating about, and they tend to clump together in massive calamity-war era debris fields. It’s not unlikely that a Gundam frame (or a ship carrying a Gundam frame) would get caught in one and eventually be recovered. Given that both Flauros and presumably Barbatos were recovered in post-battle condition (unrecoverable Gundam frames typically had their cockpits destroyed to deny them to the enemy, Barbatos needs to be refitted with a cockpit prior to deployment, so….), it’s likely that Gusion was in the same sort of condition. My main two reasons for believing that it’s not it’s original condition are that the Rebake in both its forms has High-Sensitivity sensors mounted in its head, which I took to be a feature of the frame (like how the Kimaris has a sensor package for high-speed combat), which the Brewers just didn’t use since they operate in a very dense environment, so sniping’s less viable as an option. Secondly, the Gundam frames are noted in series as being very versatile, able to mount a wide variety of equipment and still perform well (like Barbatos and Astaroth). Given that basically every other Gundam Frame we see has a largely humanoid form and is able to perform equally well on Earth and space, I find it more likely that the Brewers, a space piracy Organization, accustomed to short-range raids and quick fights in the debris field, would customise the Gusion for their own purposes, rather than Calamity-War Era Gjallarhorn hobbling themselves with such a specialised setup.

In regards to the Seven Stars, apparently the Issue Family is at its head, being (presumably) the family with the highest number of Mobile Armour kills during the Calamity War. This actually makes a whole lot of sense. Carta is the only known and active member of the family, due to her father having died when she was young/being otherwise incapacitated (I’m not sure which). Her being particularly sheltered, even for Gjallarhorn nobility tracks, since Iznario (her guardian) would want to have her pliable so he can sneak his political dealings by her. Heck, her marrying McGillis would be perfect for him, since it’d essentially subsume the Issue Family into Fareed, granting them greatly increased status. Her death, and thus of the Issue line, leaves a power vacuum in the Seven Stars, which Iok thinks McGillis is trying to fill with Hashmal. It’s possible that the rest of the families are largely equal in standing, but an imbalance would shove Fareed into the head chair. McGillis already inherited a great deal of her holdings (such as her position in the Outer Earth Regulatory Joint Fleet), and improved status would allow him to consolidate them under the banner of the Fareed Family. Though you’re absolutely correct that we just don’t know enough about Gjallarhorn’s internal workings (and status of any surviving Gundam frames) to make any certain statements about any further rankings. Though I do wonder where Ville Klassen, member of Gjallarhorn nobility would fit in. Since it’s possible that the Seere was intended to be the Klassen Family Gundam (though I confess I find that to fit far too neatly).

Astaroth being sold off is rather odd. It’s possible that the official in charge genuinely didn’t know what they were working with, somebody like Ville Klassen could have hurried to process along to get rid of it, or Daddy Ted might’ve actively sought it out and cut a deal in order to obtain it. I’d say that the fact that the equipment was stripped first at least implies that somebody in Gjallarhorn didn’t want a fully functional Gundam frame from the calamity war out there and I’d assume that they probably kept the sword from the Origin version, since it’s basically irreplaceable. It suffers purely because we know of only once that a Gundam frame is actively sold, and we only hear about it offhandedly. I suppose it is possible that other Gjallarhorn families would consider it…… I suppose disrespectful? To possess a Gundam frame associated with another family (particularly an embezzler), and again, I suppose if they’re not really thought much of by Gjallarhorn at large then there’d be little point.

Honestly, I typically read Gremory’s battle anchor damage as being from in the thick of combat/fighting something especially strong. It typically operated in a two man team along with the Oltlinde, and if I was going to put the Gremory anywhere, it’d probably be somewhere where it’s Nanolaminate Coat’s going to matter, and save something like the Dantalion catching a hit and getting wrecked. Seeing as it seems to be lightly armed for a Gundam frame, it’s possible it just broke from overuse. Vual’s just odd, since it’s specifically noted as being recovered armourless, so it almost certainly wasn’t fighting at the time.

So I realised something - two things in fact, today when thinking about Iron Blooded Orphans again.

So, Gaelio, having realised that his Schwalbe Graze isn’t enough, pulls out the Bauduin family Gundam, the Kimaris, with which to fight the Barbatos. Mcgillis (as Montag) expresses amazement that Gaelio did this, and surprise that Gundam’s are fighting one another. However, his tone is rather dry, suggesting that, while surprising, such a situation is not an unthinkable one.

So, could there have been other fights between Gundam’s post-calamity war?

The other thing is that, while we’re told that there’s 26 Gundam’s known to still exist in P.D. 323, at the start of the series (I *think* it gets pushed up to 31 by the end, since Flauros, Gusion, Vual, Asmoday and Hajiroboshi get unearthed or revealed over that timeframe, but I might have forgotten one), we don’t know for certain that all of the missing ones were destroyed during the calamity war. It’s possible some were destroyed in the intervening 300-ish years, whether by politicking (think the Warren’s and Nadira’s being shoved out along with their gundam’s) or by some other conflict (it’s of course possible that not everyone was completely willing to accept Gjallarhorn’s rule postwar, no matter what the state of things).

So it’s possible that other Gundam’s have been discovered or lost since the calamity war, and they could have intervened in numerous other conflicts in that time. Mcgillis himself notes that Gundam’s “have appeared numerous times at historical turning points and have been a great influence on the history of man”. Not “the machines that won the calamity war”. It’s of course possible that Mcgillis’ romanticism makes him a biased source, prone to flowery descriptions. But. It does seem to indicate that the Gundams have had influence beyond the Calamity War already by P.D. 323, thus implying other conflicts they’ve been involved in.

I don’t know, it’s just cool to think about (and possible fodder for sidestories set prior to tekkadan’s formation in 323).