The Military Might of Axis Zeon (post-Gryps)

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Changa
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The Military Might of Axis Zeon (post-Gryps)

Hello, denizens of mechatalk! I had a question, and the folks from Spacebattles told me to come here!

I'm in the middle of writing a fanfic for ZZ, and while I did actually go and watch it myself, it's not very useful in terms of consistant displays of Axis' military. And the fandom wiki, unfortunatly, isn't too helpful either with some of the questions I have.

So, essentially, I just need to confirm some information as at least close enough to correct. Browsing through the older threads on similair topics (thank you, honored elders, for paving the way), the common consensus seems to be that Axis' population, following the exodus to the Belt, had somewhere around 30 000 people, and 10 000 of those were soldiers. I expect that number would have increased somewhat during the decade away from the Earth Sphere. Say, maybe, 30 000 left and 35 000 - 40 000 came back? At the very least, Axis would have more soldiers, what with children growing into enlistment aid.

And as for their Mobile Suit and warship count...
Brave Fencer Kirby wrote: Sat Nov 28, 2009 1:55 am In an old thread from Gundam Watch, toysdream said that Axis had about 250 Gaza C pilots when they first showed up in Zeta Gundam, and by the end of the series it's been reduced to around 80. He also notes that the total population of Axis is around 30,000 people -- 10,000 Zeon soldiers plus their families -- though whether that's the figure for 0080 when those who choose to flee from Side 3 first arrive, or for 0087 when they return to the Earth Sphere, I don't know.
mcred23 wrote: Sat Nov 28, 2009 2:02 pm For the original Aixs, they come back to Earth with 300 Gaza type machines, 250 Gaza-C's and 50 Gaza-E's. As BFK mentioned, only 80 of the Gaza-C's survive the fighting with the AEUG and Titans at the end of the Gryps War. Mark explained some details on that, and a few other Axis MS numbers, in this thread, which end up being quite large in some cases (Such as the 800 Gaza-Cs built). There was another thread that mentioned the numbers for other Axis MS, so I'll dig around and see if I can find that. For their ship numbers, IIRC, it was very small, something like 20 warships (If even that) of all types (Most being Endra class crusiers).
toysdream wrote: Sun Nov 29, 2009 4:44 am I think I wasn't entirely clear in that thread; according to Newtype magazine, the ZZ-era Neo Zeon ends up with 800 mobile suits total. Specifically, Newtype claims that during the Neo Zeon civil war at the end of the series, Haman's forces have about 500 mobile suits and Glemy's forces have about 300, and each side has at least 10 warships.

I'm not sure how well this meshes with the animation, though. Judging from the animation, Glemy only seems to have a handful of ships and relatively few mobile suits, and it's only his Newtype Corps that enables him to hold his own against Haman. But judging by episode 44, Haman's main fleet (commanded by Chara) may have as many as 15 ships, so I have no trouble believing that the combined Neo Zeon fleet has more than 20 ships by the end of the series.
Axis Zeon, from the looks of it, seemed to have had upwards of at least 250 Mobile Suits (and at most, somewhere around 800) by the time Glemy threw his coup, and at least 20 warships combined. And with their return to the Earth Sphere, a good many veterans who had stayed in Side 3 joined up with them, bolstering their muster count by quite a bit-- and that's not counting the Remnants still waiting on Earth or doing 'Cimas' in space.

And on the topic of space and warships... the Gwadan-class page on the wiki states that, besides the Gwadan (RIP you beautiful beast) itself, there were at least two others of its class built, the Inxs and the Gwaley. I have to wonder what happened to them.

---

Total Estimates (by my count, excluding the Remnants):

Military Personal: 10 000 - 20 000? Side 3 enlisties muddle things.

Mobile Suits: 250 - 800

Warships: 20 - 50? Again, Side 3 muddles things.

Correction would be much appreciated, honored elders.
Mafty
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Re: The Military Might of Axis Zeon (post-Gryps)

Toysdream/Mark is very reliable, as are the sources in Newtype Magazine.

A big issues does seem to be the fact that the animation isn't always consistent with the later written figures. ZZ in particular has something of an issue with disappearing units by the end.
Spoiler
In the case of the Jamru Fin and Illya's ReGelgu,The units are shown flying off to the civil war, fate uncertain. Meanwhile the rest of the series focuses upon the Gundam Teams main battle.
. The result of this leaves a lot of questions with answers that probably vary from when CCA aired to the recent expanded universe entries.
Spoiler
It seemed like by the end of ZZ, Neo-Zeon was all but gone. All their special units were destroyed in the war, and with the destruction of both Core 3 and Axis their civilian population and research institutes were decimated as well(thus explaining why the whole cloning thing just sort of disappears). Thus CCA was the true last conflict of what was left of Zeon. Then Unicorn comes along and suddenly there's a whole lot more remnants with their old technology.
As for the army itself
Spoiler
We basically never see any ships destroyed by the end of the conflict as it focuses primarly upon the Gundam team itself. The Endra class in paticular is affected , as it isn't clear how many there are ,or which survive.
This also isn't the first time that animation issues affect the narrative.
Spoiler
At the end of Zeta Gundam there are some surviving Nemo's and Rick Dias's, likewise some pilots have ejected in cockpit pods. All of these are gone by the time ZZ starts, and Fa is the only pilot.
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Seto Kaiba
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Re: The Military Might of Axis Zeon (post-Gryps)

Changa wrote: Sun Mar 26, 2023 2:08 am So, essentially, I just need to confirm some information as at least close enough to correct. Browsing through the older threads on similair topics (thank you, honored elders, for paving the way), the common consensus seems to be that Axis' population, following the exodus to the Belt, had somewhere around 30 000 people, and 10 000 of those were soldiers. I expect that number would have increased somewhat during the decade away from the Earth Sphere. Say, maybe, 30 000 left and 35 000 - 40 000 came back? At the very least, Axis would have more soldiers, what with children growing into enlistment aid.
There are several inaccuracies in the quoted posts.

None of the books I've checked thus far offer any kind of directional estimate of the population of the resource asteroid "Axis" prior to it becoming a de facto Zeon military installation. The 30,000 person figure mentioned is not the total population of the asteroid, it's the population of the first (but not only) Zeon refugee fleet that arrived there on March 28th UC 0081 (per MS Encyclopedia 02: Gryps War). As such, we also don't know how many people lived there in specific terms. Mobile Suit Z Gundam Setting Documents Collection claims that, by the time emigration to the asteroid ceased, something like half of the surviving Zeon forces from the end of the One Year War lived there. How many people THAT was, we've got no way of knowing. Probably a fair bit more than just 30,000 though. These things typically aren't discussed in such explicit terms in the official materials.
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D_I
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Re: The Military Might of Axis Zeon (post-Gryps)

found this old post
Deacon Blues wrote: Mon Jun 04, 2012 4:27 pm Welp, here's some useless information from moi as usual. Paging through the U.C. Hardgraph Novel (Zeon Side), I came across a population distribution footnote for one of the chapters. Skipping the in between blurbs that state what happens, here's the gist of it:

OVERALL POPULATION: Approximately 11.3 billion (at the time of the outbreak)

EARTH FEDERATION GOVERNMENT SIDE

Earth: 4.3 billion
Sides 1, 2, 4: 2.8 billion (total)
Side 5: 2 billion (up to 80 colonies are here)

PRINCIPALITY OF ZEON

Side 3: 1.3 billion

NEUTRAL

Side 6: 900 million

Cue the One Week War, Battle of Loum and the good ole colony drop and we're left with this:

EARTH FEDERATION GOVERNMENT SIDE

Earth: 3.8 billion (500 million killed)
Sides 1, 2, 4: Virtually Annihilated (2.8 billion killed)
Side 5: Virtually Annihilated (2 billion killed)

PRINCIPALITY OF ZEON

Side 3: 1.3 billion (Virtually Unharmed)

NEUTRAL

Side 6:
900 million (no change)

In other words, there was a change in the ratio of the population of the Earth Sphere from the One Week War to the Battle of Loum: Earth Federation Government (3.8 billion) versus Principality of Zeon (1.3 billion). In the span of just two weeks, 5.3 billion people's lives were turned into space dust.
not sure if this info is canon or not
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MythSearcher
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Re: The Military Might of Axis Zeon (post-Gryps)

D_I wrote: Mon Mar 27, 2023 10:30 am found this old post
Deacon Blues wrote: Mon Jun 04, 2012 4:27 pm Welp, here's some useless information from moi as usual. Paging through the U.C. Hardgraph Novel (Zeon Side), I came across a population distribution footnote for one of the chapters. Skipping the in between blurbs that state what happens, here's the gist of it:

OVERALL POPULATION: Approximately 11.3 billion (at the time of the outbreak)

EARTH FEDERATION GOVERNMENT SIDE

Earth: 4.3 billion
Sides 1, 2, 4: 2.8 billion (total)
Side 5: 2 billion (up to 80 colonies are here)

PRINCIPALITY OF ZEON

Side 3: 1.3 billion

NEUTRAL

Side 6: 900 million

Cue the One Week War, Battle of Loum and the good ole colony drop and we're left with this:

EARTH FEDERATION GOVERNMENT SIDE

Earth: 3.8 billion (500 million killed)
Sides 1, 2, 4: Virtually Annihilated (2.8 billion killed)
Side 5: Virtually Annihilated (2 billion killed)

PRINCIPALITY OF ZEON

Side 3: 1.3 billion (Virtually Unharmed)

NEUTRAL

Side 6:
900 million (no change)

In other words, there was a change in the ratio of the population of the Earth Sphere from the One Week War to the Battle of Loum: Earth Federation Government (3.8 billion) versus Principality of Zeon (1.3 billion). In the span of just two weeks, 5.3 billion people's lives were turned into space dust.
not sure if this info is canon or not
The official estimated numbers of Earth's population killed after the colony drop is 200 million by EF(20 million immediate and the rest are by indirect causes like tsunami, starvation because of severed logistics, etc.) and the number was reduced to 20 million after the war because they found out a lot of those 200 million just lost contact because of the tsunami, Minovsky particle scatter, and chaos within EF, etc. but still alive.

The numbers for the colonies are very likely taken and modified from Rapport Deluxe's numbers, but as we have discussed in one of the post here, the population numbers of the colonies is highly unrealistic. None of the visual depiction either in anime or manga showed that high of a population, not even the slumps showed that high density. The calculations was like 10 or 20 layers of completely filled high scrapers, each layer only having 3 metres in height and everyone only having a couple of square metres of space.(including public space like roads and obviously you need elevators for that) but most of the depictions in shows are large luxurious suburb or even rural areas in the colonies with the exception of slumps having more like modern city life density and spacious roads, high ceilings.

This is the main problem of them trying to stick to the settings of each side only having a few dozen of colonies(30 or 40) other than Side 5 having double that number(60 or 80), and Side 3 having closed type cylinders instead of open ones(so doubling the land size and population without doubling the colonies), but fail to do a simple estimation of the density resulted in the colonies if they really fit that much people into them.
Mafty
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Re: The Military Might of Axis Zeon (post-Gryps)

That seems to be a reoccurring issue with the depiction of the colonies, mainly that they never seem to have enough build up or population to match the background info. Logically the density should resemble Coruscant the city planet from Star Wars; although it's worth noting that later UC works like Unicorn and F91 show modern high density apartment buildings in different parts of the cities. For the AU's we have the colonies from Gundam Wing, which do actually resemble large density cities.

On a similear note with Axis, how much space did the Moussa habitation block add? Background materials indicated it provided much needed space for the inhabitance , however in the animation all we really see is the palace.
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MythSearcher
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Re: The Military Might of Axis Zeon (post-Gryps)

Mafty wrote: Thu Mar 30, 2023 9:42 am That seems to be a reoccurring issue with the depiction of the colonies, mainly that they never seem to have enough build up or population to match the background info. Logically the density should resemble Coruscant the city planet from Star Wars; although it's worth noting that later UC works like Unicorn and F91 show modern high density apartment buildings in different parts of the cities. For the AU's we have the colonies from Gundam Wing, which do actually resemble large density cities.

Nobody bothered to run the density numbers in a calculator.
O'Neill Cylinder originally says 10mil for a colony, max. They somehow got 30mil per colony and still think using Fusion to power them is enough, ignoring the density problem, hey, their estimate is 25 mil per colony on average for open types, so only 2.5x.
Though to be fair, most of the depictions of O'Neill cylinder give us a pretty low density view, and they probably just thought 3x of that isn't too bad without thinking 10mil is max and the depicts are more like <1mil per colony...
On a similear note with Axis, how much space did the Moussa habitation block add? Background materials indicated it provided much needed space for the inhabitance , however in the animation all we really see is the palace.
You can try to extrapolate the size with this.
https://truth.bahamut.com.tw/s01/201308 ... a0c98a.JPG
It is actually pretty big. While much smaller than a regular O'Neil cylinder, iirc Axis only has like 30k people.
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