The Official Gundam 00 Anime Thread Mk 5.0

[Black Knight]

I wonder what qualifies one to be an ace in the AEU.

'cuz if Patrick is their ace, then hell, I could be their ace.

Obviously it's that when most AEU pilots get shot down, they're killed in the process. Patrick is an "ace" because he gets shot down, but survives. Perhaps rather than shooting down 5+ enemy machines, an AEU "ace" survives having 5+ of his own MS shot out from under him...

[Destroy Gundam]

The other possibilities are that A: They counted those balloons and other targets from the first episode as "kills", or B: His kills were people who were even worse than he is.

Either way, it's clear that he's really going to need to work to be considered an actual ace.

[OpMegs]

I wonder what qualifies one to be an ace in the AEU.

'cuz if Patrick is their ace, then hell, I could be their ace.

I don't think Patrick's really any less skilled than Graham or Sergei at the moment. At least, from what's been shown. The devil's in the details.

- Patrick is ambushed by the Exia at the Enact demonstration. Not knowing anything about the opponent, he attacks anyway and gets pwned.

- Graham takes on the Exia in his Flag, having seen a little bit of what it can do when it owned Patrick and being a decent judge of tactics. He still loses his rifle and saber and is forced to retreat lest he too suffer a humiliating defeat.

- Sergei takes on Setsuna with pretty much no prior experience with the Exia, and his Hi-Mo Tieren manages to....make the Exia's head creak a little before getting diced.

- Graham takes on the Exia again, the third time he's seen it, with the UberFlag tuned to face down the higher performance Gundam, and manages to throw the Exia off balance, even if Setsuna was already retreating.

- Patrick goes up against the Virtue, which he's just seen use its GN bazooka on ground targets, and orders an attack with high performance, high speed MS. He barely avoids being vaporized because no one knew Virtue had a second pair of BFGs.

Now, Patrick knows next to nothing about the Virtue. About all he could know would likely be that it has its BFG(from the elevator attack video footage). The rest we can parse out through logic. A gun that big would presumably take time to charge and be easy to avoid with something as maneuverable as an Enact if they saw it getting ready. So an attack run would probably be able to be carried out with impunity.

However, that failed to factor in the unknown(until now) GN Cannons, and Patrick still managed to evade, which was better than his wingmen did.

So, if Patrick's not put up a worse showing than any other ace, why does he seem so much less skilled? It's his attitude. Graham is cool and self-assured, but not boastful. Sergei's respectful of his opponent's skills and stoic. Patrick advertises himself as if he's the Second Coming of Char Aznable, and when he inevitably gets shown up, it comes across as his getting what he deserves for being so unduly smug. It's a perception thing.

Heck, the person that's put in the best showing so far is Ali, who's managed to do more on his first sortie against the Exia than all three other aces combined.

[ShadowCell]

The best part was when he arrived at Moralia and told them all that he was here to save them, and the Moralians were all "Wtf I thought the HRL was the only faction that had mentally handicapped MS pilots."

Anyway. 25 pages! New thread get.