Those Crazy Aura Battlers

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Imperial
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Those Crazy Aura Battlers

I've been making my way through Dunbine for the past few weeks and falling in love with the show. I really like the swords-and-robots aesthetic that has since been all-but-enshrined by Escaflowne, and Tomino's writing has so far been free of the more irritating habits that crippled Brain Powered and Zeta Gundam.

However, years of digging through Gundam's mechanical minutiae has made me yearn for some more insight into the bug-bots populating the war with Drake.

MAHQ has some profiles for the various Aura Battlers, but plenty more are still left blank, so I find myself wondering about all of these new Battlers that keep popping up to harass Shou. Gundam doesn' give many of the suits-of-the-week much explanation either, but various secondary sources have fleshed out things like the Gouf losing out to the Zaku as the next ground-pounder to replace the aging Zaku II, the Gelgoog being Zeon's beam rifle breakthrough, the Barzam as a potential front liner to replace the likes of the Hizack and Marasai, etc. I had hoped there would be similar information on the Aura Battlers.

For instance, the Billunbee/Virunvee seems to be steadily replacing the Drumlo as the "grunt" Battler of Drake's army while Leprechaun is shaping up to the high-tier model that the Dunbine used to be. But that's just a shot in the dark based on how common/uncommon a given model is.

Do we happen to know anything more about the Battlers not detailed on MAHQ?
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Kuruni
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Re: Those Crazy Aura Battlers

AFAIK...
- While Virunvee was suppose to replace Drumlo, many Ah soldiers still prefer Drumlo. Mostly because Virunvee's range weapons (aura shot and aura launcher) have much less ammo when compare to Drumlo's flare bomb.
- Leprechaun is more or less a fail prototype. It has so many weapons that aura muscle distribute too much power to these armaments and result in lower performance than they expect. The armor is also quite thin. It still pack good firepower, but not as good as they want.
- Zwarth is pretty much corrected version of Leprechaun, with excellent performance, firepower, armor. But Zet and Shott feel that the humanoid AB has reach its potential by this design, so they move on to Galava and Bubuly instead.
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Imperial
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Re: Those Crazy Aura Battlers

Thank you, Kuruni. That's exactly what I was looking for. The show provides the occasional insight, like Todd mentioning the Vierres is better than anything Zet or Shot have made (implying it's a Kingdom of Ku original), but those instances are few and far between.

I had already suspected the Virunvee was a potential Drumlo replacement, and it's interesting to note all of the Leprechaun's weapons were a fault. I had always wondered about that. But what's most intriguing is the shift to wing calibers. That's not the sort of thing you often see in a mecha show.
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