I know the concept itself is fairly ubiquitous, but I'm curious about the specific use of the concept in the form of "Active Mass Balance Auto-Control." To my knowledge the acronym has been used in several Gundam series and at least one Macross series. Searches on the internet invariably p...

I think there are two other things worth noting in the bridge/engineering placement issue. First is that the location of your main engineering spaces depends on the sort of drive system you have. Of course you are going to have machinery spaces near the drives, but the engineering powerplants themse...

I guess I want to clear something up. For the sake of simplicity in this discussion, it seems to me that people have made the distinction between mecha and powered armor; at least, I know I have in my posts. In actuality, I view powered armor to be a subset of the whole range of mecha. Hence, I am d...

A bit of a correction here; manned spaceflight takes place at really low acceleration. The velocities are enormous Brain fart. Of course you're right. I was thinking acceleration but wrote velocity. After all, it is the acceleration that turns meat bags into goo. That depends on the development pat...

To address the idea of mecha in space first, I completely agree with Kirby. Flywheels or even maneuvering thrusters all make more sense than flailing limbs, which, by the way, could not be used to move with and fight at the same time, kind of a downside. But I think the larger point is that actual m...

To deal with the whole human adaptability thing for a moment, I think one big positive a remote system has going for it is the reaction time. It's true that a human can deal with problems out of the standard operating envelope more easily. But if you make that envelope large enough, any automated sy...

What you are taking about makes sense for the status quo concepts of the GitS universe, but the problem is the course of the manga, movies, and anime show that these concepts are not as concrete as is assumed. After all, the Tachikoma's develop ghosts and the Major movies her consciousness onto the ...

i just found that endlessly amusing, how easy it was for Belial to absolutely dominate the Arbalest. But again, that's why I said that would only count for non-Lambda driver AS's, because otherwise, if you just wanted to go to the moon badly enough, just fire up your machine.

I'm still rewatching SEED and am again noticing things. Will Mu does control the guns from the CIC at one point, at other times he's sitting next to Neumann at the station next to the helm, the fire control station, I think. Also, during the first battle when Milly and Sai and company are helping ou...

Just to make it clear what I meant, I wasn't saying that a cyberized brain doesn't need any energy, but rather than the energy could be supplied in a method other than ATP respiration. I'm thinking in terms of direct enervation of the synapses by the micromachines. The micromachines would still need...

Isn't that the point of Yuusha's preface? Arm Slaves are the effectual equivalent of Knightmare Frames and are totally unsuited for space combat, as much so as an F-15 or M1 Abrams. They have no thrusters and no space capable weapons as depicted in the anime or novels. I think that the SRW adaptatio...

Hmm, interesting points about the movement of asteroids and colonies. Makes sense, as does the idea of station keeping, again, accepting the, as you say Brave Fencer Kirby, the abundance, almost ridiculous abundance, of energy. But the problems you point out about population suffer from a few proble...

First of all, to the suit related comments, I think it's important to remember that we never see any ZAFT crews doing the same. In fact, the only suited crewmen we see aboard ZAFT ships are the technicians in the depressurized hangar bays (excluding extravagantly pressurized ships like the Minerva)....

To lans* and fala_fire: One critical thing to remember is that some of the "people" we see in the series are actually just remotely operated dolls. For instance, the vast majority of the pods we see in SSS are containing dolls that the Major uses. She doesn't actually switch her braincase ...

Okeedokee, this question got me interested and curious so I went back and reviewed some material from the series and the manga. I came up with two directions to go with this answer. The first comes from episode 4 of the Second Gig, where the MSDF helicopters are hacked by the rogue Jigabachi and end...

Thanks for the responses, but I think the fantastic reference you gave, Hyakushiki, explains it. To anyone at all interested in this question, I suggest reading the whole site; it really is fascinating. But it is also a bit technical. It took me a while to parse it, but, for the sake of others who m...

Okay, I just started re-watching Gundam SEED, again, and this time I noticed that Heliopolis and the PLANTs really ought to be flying off into space, and they certainly shouldn't be staying put in their Lagrangian points. Basically, they are all massive objects spinning around at relatively high spe...

Okay, so in some of the latest episodes of Macross Frontier, space folds and the tech behind it were featured pretty prominently and given some air time in explaining some of their limitations, from accuracy of jumps over range to fold dislocation. But none of this explains to me why, in the univers...

Okay, so I was just rewatching SEED and noticed in Phase 02, when the crew is starting up the Archangel for the first time, that someone mentions "internal inertial dampeners" coming online, during their general start-up. For a long time, I've assumed that the mobile units and larger warsh...

Seraphic is exactly right. It doesn't matter what drive system you have; simply accelerating for a long time will not increase G's. I think the real G-force misrepresentation (at least in C.E.) is that aboard ships. I can't count the number of times the Archangel or the Minerva light off their main ...