FOG3 wrote:Note the chain mine is just something it picked up, not really part of its normal armament.
It's a specialist weapon, but it was there in the first place because the Zion commandos intended for the Kampfer to use it. It wasn't just lying around, it was in one of their equipment trucks.
Normal armament consists of a MS shotgun mounted horizontally at the back of the waist or small of the back. A pair of 360mm bazookas are mounted vertically on each shoulder. A MS Panzerfaust is mounted on the outside of each leg. A beam saber is mounted in each leg about hip height, and it has head Vulcans to shoot up the light stuff. It can use beam weapons in the MS-18F version, which given the presence of beam sabers is probably more clerical then engineering iin nature. The 0080 version starts out carrying a MS shotgun.
Something to be noted is that both War in the Pocket and 8th MS Team feature mobile suits that are far too advanced for the One Year War. Most Zion mecha of the time did not have beam weaponry, much less beam sabers. Because the two series were made many years after the original, the production companies lost track of technological continuity.
Of course, that means nothing to this topic since it is just talking about a suitable mech for Ranma.
Mobile Suits are doing only 1.03 and 1.06 respectively despite largely abandoning armor due to its ineffectiveness verse beam weapons.
"???"
They never abandoned armor on Mobile Suits, and it wasn't ineffective versus beam weapons. Megaparticle beams cut through most armors pretty rapidly, yes, but even a few seconds of time bought that way could be the difference between life and death for the pilot. All of the suits right up to the latest One Year War based series are armored. The only exception was Char's Hyaku Shiki, which had minimal armor to increase its maneuverability. He thought at the time that not being where the shot was heading was more important than armor. But he was one of only a very few pilots that could sense the intent of an enemy to shoot and get out of the way.
This is why the MS-18E/F Kampfer remains a highly viable design for so long even with the high turn over in Mobile Suit design. The missiles remain perfectly adequate to take out any mass produced mobile suit, as to a large extent are the shotguns. With beam sabers and the ability to upgrade to use beam rifles it can at least in theory kill anything in the Gundam universe. It needs to use its ability to zip around however as it simply lacks to brute power or armor to be duking it out. The skill required to use one of these effectively is a higher level of dodging and overall skill then the normal pilot in the UC Gundam universe possesses, hence the design of the mass produced suits.
Not exactly. The Kampfer was designed for the Zion Commandos. It wasn't a mass production model because it was too specialized in what it was designed to do.
That's true of all of the other one-shot mobile suits as well. Most of them were either designed to complement a certain pilot's fighting style, or were prototypes meant to field test a weapon system, control system, or chassis. Mobile Armors were also rarely mass-produced because they were either designed for one job or a certain pilot, or were too complex to crank out in numbers. The RX-78 Gundam was one of three prototypes built to test certain ideas the Federation had for mobile suits designed to face Zion's Zaku. The success of the Gundam resulted in the GM, which was the Gundam simplified and pared down to just the essentials so that it could be mass produced.
I would remind people also that funnels are not the end all and be all of the Gundam universe. The original Gundam took down a unit with with vastly more funnels then is standard by 0093 with nothing more then a beam rifle and a beam saber.
...And a newtype pilot, Amuro Rei.
The usual result of putting a squadron of normal pilots in mobile suits in the way of a newtype with funnels was the death of the entire squadron of normals. There's a darned good reason why most mobile suits and mobile armors designed for use by newtypes had funnels by the time of Char's Counterattack.
Getting back on topic, I don't think Gundam is the right series to shop for a mech for Ranma Saotome. None of them really fit very well. The Kampfer is too clunky, and isn't designed for aerial combat.
If the mech has to be from Gundam (say, because the crossover is set in that universe), then a suit like Zeta Gundam would be a better choice to match Ranma's style. It's relatively light and quick to respond, can switch back and forth from air to ground modes, and is fairly agile.
If I were to choose a series to pick a mech for Ranma from, I'd probably go with Macross. Valkyries were able to pull off credible martial arts moves in the hands of a talented pilot, such as the shoulder roll seen in the opening credits of every episode. Add to that the kind of moves Max Genius regularly used in combat, and Valkyries look more like mecha that Ranma would be attracted to.