Y’know, for all the wild and crazy designs that appear in the original MSG, the one that doesn’t get talked about as much as it should is the Magella Attack.
Zeon’s primary infantry and MS support artillery.
What you have is, ostensibly, an oversized MBT that doesn’t have a traversing turret, so you have to turn the tank to aim, with a highly visible cockpit on top, and a itty bitty machine cannon on front (also not traversable).
Weird but ok; there’s precedent for self-propelled artillery.
But then they gave it the ability to separate its turret and have it…fly off?
Pros: higher altitude gives cannon longer range, increases main weapon mobility in difficult terrain.
Cons: limited fuel, so very limited flight-time and the Magella base is basically left defenseless.
Also; the 175mm main cannon isn’t recoilless? So any shots it makes are going to be wildly inaccurate and probably cause the Top to lose stability and crash?
And all this even before we take enemy mobile suit action into account.
Like, how did this design pass muster? Who saw the demonstration for this thing and said “yes, that seems like a great design. Make a thousand more of these, please.”
In fact, we can probably deduce the Magella Top had such a high failure rate because they had so many Magella Bases sitting around that they could convert into Zaku Tanks, which is a far more effective and versatile design to deploy in the field.
IDK man. Those Zeon weapons designers were high on something.
