Mobile Suit Gundam SEED/Headscratchers

• How in the hell did Kira survive after the Aegis clamped onto the Strike and self-destructed? The cockpit was charred to a crisp. There's no way that Kira could've survived that.
  • This one's All There in the Manual - in the Gundam SEED Astray side story, it's shown that Lowe witnesses the end of said battle and recovers the critically injured Kira from the Strike, bringing him to the Reverend.
    • Lowe also mention that Strike's emergency shutter just protect Kira from explosion blast, the heat still KO him though.
  • Simple. He is Kira "Jesus" Yamato.
    • Well, that bug has been squashed.
    • The heat that burned the entire cockpit? Yeah, Lowe finding Kira really doesn't explain how he survived, the blast, just shows how he got help after.
    • Lowe is there during Aegis and Strike's sword fight and quickly rush-in once th battle is over. Strike's PS went down after he already pull Kira out. You can assume that cockpit wasn't burned until the outside heat creep-in afterward.
  • This may be an example of a Chekhov's Skill; when the Archangel (and Strike) make re-entry, there's a scene where the ship's doctor is explaining to Kira's friends how tough he is. The doctor tells them that the heat in the cockpit would surely have killed any one of them, but Kira was (mostly) okay.
• During the latter half of Lacus's time on the Archangel in episodes 8-10, why was the whole incident treated as a hostage situation? If ZAFT had kept fighting the Archangel they risked blowing up Lacus along with their target, yet when Natarle informs the Le Creuset team of this they immediately accuse the heroes of taking hostages and resorting to foul play. And the weird thing is that nobody on the Archangel bothers to point this out and defend themselves, they just guilt (or not) about the situation.
  • Well this is Natarle we're talking about here...it's not as if she's known for her...kind ways.
    • In fact, at least in the official Japanese subs, Natarle's announcement to ZAFT that Lacus is on board is a fairly clear threat, considering that what she says amounts to "We rescued her for humanitarian reasons but if you keep attacking us we'll have no choice but to do as we see fit with her," rather than simply pointing out that if the Archangel blows it will take Lacus with it. Which is why Murrue gets upset with her over it.
    • Well, I don't quite remember every detail of this event but it could be 1) They simply didn't know Lacus was there. 2) They did know she was there, and was simply trying to disable the ship, then take her by hand. One or the other explains it.
    • The details are that the Vesalius was looking for Lacus when it happened on a detachment of the 8th Fleet that had been sent to meet the Archangel with supplies. Rau decided to take the opportunity to remove a weak enemy, and then turned on the Archangel when his team was finished. What Natarle did was wrong, and Mu and the others readily acknowledge that, but Mu at least does defend the action as necessary for their own survival, even if it was a war crime. What really bugs me about that whole scenario is that this was while the Vesalius and the Gamow were split up, so three of the stolen Gundams were missing. The Archangel has far, far more firepower than a Nazca, and its point defenses could have shredded most of the enemy's mobile suits, so if they had chosen to fight it out they should have been able to win that battle.
      • Yes, the Archangel could have won against the Vesalius, but what about the next battle? The Archangel was undermanned, alone, and almost running out of basic stuff like water. The crew of the Archangel had to avoid any unnessary fighting against superior ZAFT forces if they wanted to survive and reach the Earth Alliance forces. What Natarle did was as wrong as collecting the water of the destroyed Junius-7 colony, morally questionable, but definitely necessary.
  • One thing to keep in mind--from the start Le Creuset's orders have been to capture the Archangel and the Strike, not destroy them. The risk of Lacus dying from anything other than Natarle (given that she's not in one of the gun turrets) is therefore minimal.
• This isn't really anything major, but did Rev. Malchio go blind off screen or something? After the Clyne Faction goes into hiding he's always shown with his eyes closed and sometimes with a cane. I certainly don't recall seeing these attributes before then.
  • Nope, he was blind from the start.
  • Oh, okay then, I must not have paid enough attention. I could've sworn his eyes were open when he was first shown on the island... Ah, thanks anyway.
• So Cagalli was actually the princess of Orb and Kira and his friends are FROM Orb, so shouldn't they have, you know, RECOGNIZED her?
  • Well, if I ran into, say, the president's daughters in plainclothes on the street one day, I probably wouldn't recognize them either. As it stands, I don't even know their names. Plus, they were living on a space colony removed from Orb, though I don't know for how long, and might not have been keeping up with the political scene.
    • It's stated that at least one of the children, Kuzzey, was born on Heliopolis, and had never been to Earth in his life.
    • I for one can corroborate that if I saw Malia and Sasha Obama in the street without a secret service detail or some other distinctive marking I would NEVER be able to recognize them.
  • Also, Orb's political situation is a bit more complex than you've seen - there are five major houses. In other material, it's been shown that things like the Astray project were under the auspices of another of the houses, so it's quite possible that Heliopolis wasn't fully under the control of her house.
• In Phase 4, the Vesalius gives the coordinates as (0,0,0). That means that the blast is either coming from the Earth or from the inside the Vesalius itself.
  • Not necessarily. While the Vesalius or Earth would feel like the most "natural" places to anchor a 0,0,0 coordinate, coordinate systems can be arbitrarily placed anywhere and still work (provided you are careful about what they are stationary with respect to).
• The concept of the N-Jammer and it's ilk. "Yes, this machine magically stops nuclear reactions... despite the fact that not only is that impossible, but a machine that did so would likely interrupt the laws of physics! And it also screws with radio waves, in spite of the fact that this makes no sense whatsoever and has nothing to do with stopping nuclear reactions at all!" I mean, I know Gundam was never built upon realistic science, but at least the technobabble was explained in the older shows. And don't get me started on Mirage Colloid...
  • Unfortunately, if you go all Mo HS scale on Gundam, you'll find that very little actually works, especially when you start going at it with thermodynamics. Where are the radiators on the ships (in any Gundam show)? How come anybody's able to dodge particle beams? How on Earth does an I-field repel mega particles, when it's specifically stated that mega particles are electrostatically neutral? If not electrostatic, then what force is repelling the mega particles? And for that matter, why is the most effective form of combat vehicle a 10X mechanical scale replica of a human being? What it comes down to is that in terms of the science of a Gundam show, you should really just relax.
  • That said, to the particulars of the question...
    • The N-Jammer is always going to be handwavium, and I think the creators of SEED did a very smart thing by not trying to explain it, since any attempt to logically explain a physically impossible phenomenon is going to sound stupid anyway. As for the radio disruption having nothing to do with stopping fission, the device may not have been intended to do that. No doubt something like an N-Jammer is a very complex, multi-part machine, and the deafening radio noise, if you will, may well be a result of some other process that helps fuel the fission-stoppage.
    • As far as Mirage Colloid goes, it's actually not all that impossible. The idea of refracting radiation around a vehicle to neutralize active scans isn't so far out, and even rerouting visible light could be done. I realize the idea of using microprisms in a magnetic field is iffy, given the amount of finesse required with the magnetics, but it at least has some kernel of plausibility to it. Now I know about the thermodynamics "where is all the mobile suit's heat going?" issue, and that should have been addressed, but I think that once again we're dealing with the question of whether or not you should try to explain something that can't be explained. All I can say is that in my opinion, so long as they went a good way with science and then said "on the thermodynamics...yeah, just go with us on that", I'm okay with it.
    • To address the questions about Minovsky Physics, I think Minovsky Particles produce a new fundamental force that repulses pretty much any/everything. I think said force is also the reason they form the I-field lattice structure, that's how they balance their internal repulsive forces. It wouldn't be Minovsky Physics if it weren't explained, now would it.
• The characters float around in space, carrying trays of food that don't float.
  • They manage this kind of thing in real life, too. Check out this picture from the International Space Station. The cans and utensils and such are held by the magnets, and I guess the food is viscous enough to stick to the container and to parts of itself rather than float away. Something similar may be happening with the characters' food.
    • That's possible. In general the artificial gravity of the Archangel and other spaceships is inconsistent and just kind of wonky, though.
    • When the show long view shots of the corridors in the Archangel's living sections, you can actually see curvature, which may imply that those corridors use some form of centrifugal force to create artificial gravity, while the active sections of the ship that are used for combat and operation purposes are straight and have a zero-g environment. Although, this doesn't explain how they avoid issues when the ship descends to earth.
    • The Archangel has two distinctive sets of corridors. The blue and gray areas are the zero-g parts, and those are the only places where people float around. The crew accommodations, including the mess hall, have yellow walls, so they're easy to tell apart. These areas do have artificial gravity. When in space, you can clearly see the upwards curvature of the floor of the corridor, indicating a centrifugal gravity system as mentioned above. If you take a look at these same areas when they are on Earth, however, the corridor instead curves to the side, indicating that when they enter the atmosphere the gravity block deactivates and turns on its side so the same facilities can be used on both.
• The Federation put those N-Jammer cancelers into production awfully quick after it got the design. It seems like it should have taken them longer to make enough for all those nuclear missiles.
  • Mass Production. When One thing becomes the priority of something as big as the Planet Earth, they make sure it gets made A.S.A.P. Also, though my details on this is etchy, is there a clear time skip between these things. I mean, i remember at one point in MSG, time intervals in-between episodes were a month long. Gundam is notorious for time skips like this.
  • Specifically, according to the official site the Battle of Mendel takes place on July 12, development of the canceler-equipped missiles begins on July 16, the final attack fleet isn't deployed until September 11, and the Battle of Boaz when the missiles are first used is on September 23. So, there's a few months in there. It's relatively reasonable when you consider that the Freedom and Justice had to have been developed in a mere three months. (The Heliopolis Gundams was stolen on January 25, and the Freedom was stolen on May 5)
  • It's one of the dumber things about Gundam series that we have to accept. In reality it would take a minimum of several months (more likely at least a year) for them to refit factories and train workers to mass produce new machines. For the sake of the plot, Gundam series ignore that sort of thing.
• Doesn't this occur to anyone that at the end of the show, Kira survives his mobile suit almost being completely destroyed by hard Gamma Radiation? Forget the radiation poisoning, how the hell doesn't he even get cancer? Oh, and as he is floating in space, we can see he has a hole in his face plate. It's almost like it's a Refuge in Audacity. It's so ludicrous you just can't find a way to condemn it.
  • Gamma radiation isn't as destructive as you seem to think. The reason nukes are so unpleasant on Earth is that the gamma radiation is absorbed by the atmopshere and largely converted into heat, which causes the explosion and the shockwave associated with nuclear weapons. In space, no atmosphere, no explosion, no shockwave. Sure, it'd still do damage, but it did damage the Freedom. As far as cancer goes, radiation doesn't really work like that. It doesn't make cancerous growths magically appear, exposure to radiation just makes the eventual development of cancer more likely. And in any case, this is a setting with medical technology advanced enough to modify children into genetically enhanced Born Winners while still in the womb -- I imagine that they've got cancer well and truly cured. As for the last, I don't remember there being a proper hole in Kira's helmet visor at any point, but cracked or leaking helmets are nothing new in Gundam, and would be survivable even in real life as long as it wasn't a large enough breech to cause explosive decompression -- which would effectively require the helmet's entire visor to shatter instantly.
    • Kira got the Freedom away just in time as GENESIS fired. If there was any (off-screen) contact, it would've been to the legs, which considering the way the shots from GENESIS are shown probably would have disabled the Freedom via electrostatic discharge or radiation surge within the Freedom's reactor, necessitating an immediate shut down. As for Kira's helmet: I do not recall seeing any cracks, let alone holes.
• Given that the Archangel is supposed to fight in space, why did they need to do that wonky maneuver to shoot the ocean targets underneath it. As a space capital ship, shouldn't it have guns on the underside?
  • The Archangel is not only meant to fight in space, it's also an atmospheric ship. Part of the reason there are no guns on the underside is because that is where the wings of the ship generate lift to keep it in the air. There was really no room for them. The reel question should have been why they needed the Gottfried's to shoot them when the Valiants should have been able to do it.
    • Have you SEEN how long the Valiants are? By the time you got the barrel aimed anywhere NEAR the (fast-moving) enemy suits, the damn things would be dragging in the water. Not to mention how slow the Valiants are to rotate, and the fact the gunners apparently can't hit the broad side of a Naszca with them, let alone mobile suits.
• What the hell was up with those gunmen who came after Lacus in the theater? I understand she was being hunted for treason, but why did they all wear spy gear (suits, gloves, silencers on their pistols) to find her? We saw earlier that Patrick Zala had no problem sending uniformed soldiers to kill Seigl Cline, and he had already claimed Lacus an enemy of the state. Was it really necessary to hire a hit squad to take down Lacus rather than just having a military squad on standby in case Athrun made contact? It just seems out of place.
  • Lacus still had a shitload of support among the PLANTs, not to mention having direct contact with most members of the Clyne Faction. The fact that the hit squad didn't shoot first (or bring any snipers) is a fair indication that Patrick Zala DID, in fact, want to take her into custody, drag out the names of her cohorts, then put her through a Kangaroo Court for high treason.
  • Sending the guys in spy gear is also a little less obvious than sending soldiers. Assuming that he was aware of Lacus' support and bodyguards, Patrick wouldn't want to send someone who could be detected so easily.
• How did Kira possibly get in the Freedom Gundam, leave the PLANT, evade ZAFT forces and get to Alaska in time to save the Archangel? Even if we assume the PLANT was relatively close to Earth it should have taken the fastest possible vessel hours^[1] to get there. By the time he was shown the Gundam the battle was already close to self-destruct time, they should have been long dead before he even reached Earth's atmosphere!
  • There's nothing specifically saying those two events were taking place simultaneously. For all we know Kira may have been on his way to Earth as the battle was starting, or even before. The reason it's shown simultaneously is likely so that the Freedom could be revealed just before it's big battle debut.
    • There are two problems with that. The first is that no transition of time is shown, so the viewer would naturally assume that the events were happening at the same time. The second problem is that Kira's entire reason for using the Freedom to get to Earth was the revelation that the Operation Spitbreak was actually taking place at that moment and that the target was the Atlantic Federation HQ in Alaska and not Panama. In other words the attack was already occurring by the time Kira found out about it.

1. ↑ assuming applied phlebotinum sped him up, if it were realistic it would have been more like days at best