Strike Freedom's and ∞ Justice reactor question

[4Tran]

Originally Posted by srb

I think that they are supposed to be mass-produced, but the hero complex together with an in-universe reason (too costly, advanced et cetera) is generally why they're not.

It's the in-universe explanation, but I don't think that it's a very good one. First off, for modern aircraft the sunk-in development costs far more than a single model, generally, at least equivalent to the first dozen or so models. Next, you'd think that the designers would have been able to figure out roughly how much the machine was going to cost when it would be mass-produced before they actually started building them. Finally, if cost were really that much of an issue then we should end up seeing fewer prototypes rather than more of them.

OFFTOPIC ---- That sort of sounds like the US procurement program.

A perhaps more realistic production order would probably be Strike as the technology demonstrator, a Strike Dagger prototype, the Strike Dagger limited production series, a 105 Dagger prototype, and then the 105 Dagger production series. Making any major changes generally requires another prototype before tooling up for mass-production.


Offtopic:

Originally Posted by srb

Sure you're not thinking of the S-37A/Su-47? The Su-37 was an improved Su-35, and both of these planes are mass-production prototypes, but the Su-35 has entered limited production.

Nope, the Su-37 counts as well. Only one model ever existed, and it started life as a Su-35. Sukhoi upgraded it to Su-37 specs by putting in the 3D vectored thrust technology. Eventually, they actually rebuilt it to Su-35 standards again. There are no current plans to build Su-37s, and until they do, I'd say that it was just a one-off demonstrator. Funny enough, the closest thing to the production version of the Su-37 would be the Su-30MKI, but it would be sort of silly to consider the former as the prototype for the latter.

[tritoch]

Like I said, the original strike was a benchmark. They got the data from the original strike and they figured, grunts can't do crap with the strike since none of them has the piloting skills kira had in seed so why not we make them out of cheap parts? Then ofcourse, when they did go with the cheap parts, that new strike didn't fare so well cause the grunts absolutely sucked. And they did the revisions once again and we now have the perfect suit for grunt units, too bad the grunts still suck.

See the logic?

[Vallen Chaos Valiant]

Strike's claims to fame were its striker packs, phase shift armor, and the GUNDAM OS. As far as I can tell, the Strike Daggers only incorporated the first of these technologies, which means that the other technologies were considered inappropriate (for whatever reason) for mass-production. This means that while Strike may have been meant as a preliminary prototype of sorts, it ended up as a technology test platform. The true prototype would actually be whatever Strike Dagger they first ended up building.

Well, the whole "cheap parts" thing with daggers was because they were desperate to cut production time in order to equip a large number of pilots initially.

One can argue that the truly revolutionary component of the original Strike was the packs. And that was the advance given the most attention. Even ZAFT feel the need to copy that with the Wizard packs.

Phase-shift armour in CE, IMO, is like alloy wheels or rear-spoiler on a road car; it improves performance, but not by enough to justify it to be installed in standard models.

As for the Gundam OS? As far as I can tell, the OS isn't an issue anymore.

[4Tran]

My point is that as long as any major changes are made, then they would have to redo the prototyping process. The reasons for making such changes are pretty much irrelevant; it's the fact that they have to alter how the new machine has to be designed, and how it is built that's important. It's not as simple as just removing the Phase-Shift armor, they have to figure out what kind of material is going to be used in its place, how much that new armor is going to weigh, and how its mass is going to be distributed. All of this entails a large amount of redesign, and hence calls for a new prototype. It would be accurate to say that the Strike Daggers are descended from the Strike family of designs, but it's sort of stretching things to call Strike an actual prototype for the Strike Dagger.

Sort of offtopic:

Phase-Shift armor is valuable simply because there are still many battlefield threats that are unable to defeat it. Offering effective immunity from entire classes of weapons is an extremely attractive advantage for any weapon design. While it may not be cost effective to incorporate for current mass-produced models, it's quite obvious that the mobile suit designers haven't given up on doing so. In a way, it's akin to the US military's handling of stealth technology. Originally, it was only used in a small of B-2s, F-117s, and maybe SR-71s, but it's supposed to be incorporated into hundreds of F-22s and F-35s in the near future.

[Anh_Minh]

Phase Shift would have been the single most valuable tech of the G-series had not Zaft gotten its hands on the beam MS weaponry tech. After that, it was, if not useless, not nearly as cost effective.

[freedomgs]

Freedom and Justice use nuclear as their power source, which mean NEVER run out of Power , not like Destiny, there is a eq. show destiny acutally running out of power, JUSTICE AND FREEDOM NEVER!

[Mr_Paper]

Thank you for at least attempting to read the previous eight pages of discussion. >.>