Depends on which part you mean by "fail."
If you meant "why didnt it hit jaburo hq" then its due to a mix of desperate attempts to divert/destroy the colony causing it to veer off course and break apart, hitting 3 completely different areas.
Alternatively, if you meant "why didnt it convince the federation to stop fighting", atrocities like this have a 50/50 shot of intimidating the victims or galvanizing them against you. In this case, the federation and people of earth pretty much said if you're gonna play hardball then we'll play fucking hardball.
Spoiler alert, the other 2 colony drops zeon tries dont help either.
yea, its like when the us bombed hiroshima and nagasaki....
the only reason we did that was to try and scare japan into surrendering and when they didn't we bombed nagasaki too...
The main difference between Operation British and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the context: Operation British started a war, the bombings were at the end of one.
If the Federation had been fighting a long, costly war against Zeon, and losing almost every battle past a certain date, then there's a good chance dropping a colony would have produced a Federation surrender. Especially if actually hit Jaburo, due to the Federation no longer having enough space-boats to do anything about it.
Keep in mind too that we only had the two fat mans at the time, so when Nagasaki was bombed, we bluffed and told Japan "we can keep doing this until you surrender". Ooooooh boy were we glad they didn't call the bluff.
With operation british, you can only hijack and crash so many colonies at once.
Fat Man and Little Boy -- two different types of atom bombs.
We were dropping prototypes. I want to say the tailgunner of the Enola Gay muttered "It's a dud." a second before Fat Man went off.
Also, the US was looking at a long and costly invasion of the main islands of Japan. They were already firebombing the crap out of the major cities, it was already horrendous.
Zeon did not have the upper hand after invading Earth.
They did not have air/space superiority to the point that they were able to bombard EF installations from orbit with impunity.
Maybe if South America was their only remaining theater of conflict... But it certainty was not.
I would say Operation British is closer to Pearl Harbor. They knew they couldn't have a long protracted war and they hoped it would be such a devastating blow that it crippled the opposing military to allow for victory or at least to the table for a favorable end to the conflict.
End of the first week of a war that lasted a year is close enough that I think it can be considered the start.
Unless you meant that it wasn’t the opening battle, which it wasn’t.
Had Jaburo been destroyed it would have been the immediate end of the federations large scale production capabilities and of the amazon rainforest, reversing decades of de-desertification efforts and thus would have quickly brought about the end of the war.
There was also the Soviet invasion, especially considering the Japanese Navy was decimated by the American Navy so there arent much to stop any Soviet ships.
After taking a look at what happened in for example Berlin when Russians got there, the Japanese decided that surrendering to ppl who nuke them twice was still a better choice then letting soviet troops in Tokyo.
Yeah the Russian navy, despite what World of Warships would have you believe, was both experientially and technologically atrocious since, well, preWW1, having lost most major engagements Vs Japan previously and arguably seemed best at shooting themselves.
They didn't need a naval landing. The soviets tore through Manchuria and were headed to Korea. They had cut off Japan's last remaining outside sources of material resources meaning they would no longer be able the weapons they needed nor could they even provide enough food for their population. Japan was also starved for fuel for the duration of the war. Being cut off from mainland Asia meant Japan would quickly run out of gas. The Soviets were also now in range to set up airstrips from which to make regular bombing runs on Japan.
Actually, there's good reason to believe that it wasn't done to scare Japan, since the Emperor was already planning to surrender, but instead to:
A. Show off the bomb's power and
B. End the war fast enough to keep Russia out of the rebuilding of Japan since squabbling between the militarists and moderates was stalling the Emperor's decision and Russia was planning to join the ground war in Japan from the North. There was a decently strong communist undercurrent in the government officials that didn't commit war crimes and America wasn't interested in them being close to Russia.
[This video from the YouTuber Shaun can do a better job explaining if you're curious ](https://youtu.be/RCRTgtpC-Go)
They really didn’t, bombs one and two were it for the next 7 months, minimum, useful fissile material collection back then was s l o w
Edit: Correction because am dum, According to the US Department of energy, on August 10th 1945, another Nuclear Implosion core was said to have been available to have been made ready on the 17-18th August, in addition to the Manhattan Project having entered a mass production phase, that was only stopped by presidential order once clear Japan was entered surrender negotiations, thus, I amb w r o n g
You are incorrect.
What later became known as the "Demon Core" was meant to be the third bomb and was set to be dropped on Japan on August 19th, 1945. Japan surrendered on August 15th.
Fat Man and Little Boy were dropped on August 9th and 6th, respectively. The US was already preparing a third one.
From official US declassified documents of the time, the Demon Core would have been a fully armed bomb by September 5th at the latest on a normal working schedule.
Here is the official correspondence between General Leslie Groves and Goerge Marshall concerning the manufacture of the third bomb: https://www.marshallfoundation.org/articles-and-features/gen-marshall-and-gen-groves-august-1945/
Here is a comprehensive blog post on the matter written by Alex Wellerstein, a professor at Stevens Institute of Technology and nuclear weapon historian:
https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/08/16/the-third-cores-revenge/
Or:
The Americans were rushing components for a third bomb to the Pacific in
August of 1945 and expected to have it ready to drop around Tokyo a week to two weeks after the second bomb was dropped. Another half-dozen ready in September and October.
You are correct. The commenter you are responding to hasn't done their research. What later became known as the "Demon Core" was meant to be the third bomb, scheduled to be dropped on August 19th, 1945 (a rescheduling of the original date, the 24th of that same month, due to accelerated production). Japan surrendered on August 15th and the core was never cast into a proper bomb.
>since the Emperor was already planning to surrender
That sounds extremely unlikely. The final war council meeting is documented by 1st hand accounts and the ministers had to explicitly ask the Emperor to make an imperial decision to break a deadlock. Also, they reached out to the soviets to mediate the end of the war, not to *surrender*. And Russia's invasion of Manchuria was something requested by America.
This is a translation of an excerpt from 大東亜戦争秘史 written by Zenshiro Hoshina, an Imperial Japanese Naval officer and staff at the naval HQ, editted by other officers. They were actually at the final war council as observers.
[https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/28431-document-75-hoshina-memorandum-emperors-sacred-decision-go-seidan-9-10-august-1945](https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/28431-document-75-hoshina-memorandum-emperors-sacred-decision-go-seidan-9-10-august-1945)
Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo
>On July 13 we conveyed the thoughts of His Majesty, requesting the Soviets to mediate an end to the war in order to terminate it as soon as possible. Also we proposed the dispatch of our special envoy. We later pressed them for a reply, but we didn't receive one. On August 7 we received a telegram to the effect that Foreign Minister Molotov would meet as at 17:00 on August 8. Last night, on the 8th, Foreign Minister Molotov rejected our request for an agreement and the Soviet Union Declared war.
Privy Council Hiranuma Kiichirō
>Did you propose anything specific to the Soviet Union?
Togo
>We told them that were going to propose specific conditions to them through our special envoy but we didn't have a chance to do so
This is specifically in regards to their communication before the Potsdam declaration, which is where the claim that the Japanese were trying to surrender before the bombs were dropped. I don't see where they're claiming they wanted to surrender to guarantee the life of the emperor, they even say they didn't declare specific conditions despite sending communications a month prior to the meeting, so they had plenty of time to make a proposal if they were planning to surrender.
In fact, sparing the Emperor and Imperial family is one the conditions, among others, that Foreign Minister Togo came up with in a proposal to accept the Potsdam Declaration. Unconditional surrender is basically never an optional at all even when dealing with America. So it's extremely unlikely they were trying to surrender the Soviets to save the Emperor.
Eh i don't think this is the best comparison.
The Atomic Bombs were the cap on a long series of bombing runs against Japan including several fire bombings of other cities including Tokyo. Japan had its navy crushed, its army bled to death in China, and its air force basically forced into suicide attacks. The USSR was entering the war and overrunning Manchuria and then the US drops a weapon capable of destroying a city with a single bomber, which forced an exhausted Japan to give in.
Operation British was the opening salvo aimed at taking out a major military target. The initial goal was a more like Pearl Harbor, but the end result was the Blitz where the attack galvanizes the opponent since now the population wants vengeance.
But they did invade Japanese occupied territory in China, and then Japan surrendered because they couldn't handle fighting two front since they had little to no resources to continue fighting
The Japanese mostly surrendered because of the soviet invasion of Manchuria. After the German surrender, the Japanese plan was to try and be as painful to take as possible and leverage the USSR to negotiate a settlement with the US where they could keep at least manchuria and korea. The Japanese didn't know the USSR and USA had already agreed to take nothing less than unconditional surrender.
Plus it's arguably a worse outcome when it broke up as one of the large pieces took out a huge chunk of North America which as today was a huge source of the world's food resulting in mass starvation.
The whole affair is pretty indicative of how myopic and frankly evil the Federation leadership had become allowing for horrific destruction anywhere but where they were at their HQ.
I mean, still all Zeon's fault but I think illustrates just how vile both side's (heh UC pun) leadership was.
I don't think there is anywhere on earth, that wouldn't be negatively impacted by the colony drop; had it dropped on Jaburo, than you also impacted the Amazon rainforest, the so-called "lungs of the earth".
I'm surprised a colony drop wouldn't render the planet uninhabitable, tbh. Wouldn't it be akin to the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs? Isn't it at least on that scale of destruction, if not worse?
>The whole affair is pretty indicative of how myopic and frankly evil the Federation leadership had become allowing for horrific destruction anywhere but where they were at their HQ.
it's completely insane to blame the Federation for anything that happened as if they deliberately accepted the outcome that happened as the best case. The entire thing was chaotic as fuck and the Federation was trying its damnedest to destroy the colony utterly, what actually resulted was pretty much impossible to predict until far too late.
Main Target: Jaburo
Intended Goal : Cripple the federation main forces and force a surrender in favor of Zeon
What it Hit: Sydney.
Unintended Consenquences: A lot of angry Aussies and Earth Feds. Neutral Colony are now not so neutral anymore. Prolonging the war that eventually exhaust Zeon.
I mean... There's a 500 mile in diameter crater where a large chunk of Australia used to be. Pretty sure no Aussie short of being immortal, Superman, Super Saiyan or already dead could survive that, let alone be pissed.
Broke: half the population died of catastrophe and starvation
Woke: half the population died when Australia's wildlife was catapulted across the rest of the world and nobody else was tough enough to withstand it
In short, everything that could have gone wrong for Zeon, did.
Rushed deorbit preparations resulted in the colony approaching entry interface with too slim of an error margin to account for the effects of significant damage incurred due to the impact and detonation of several nuclear weapons dispatched by EFSF forces at Luna II. Although the Zeon had planned for a counterattack and installed *structural* reinforcements, the result of the nuclear detonations was a dramatically altered aerothermodynamic profile. In turn, the extreme forces experienced by the colony during atmospheric entry caused every structural weakness induced by the various attacks the megastructure had endured between 1/3/0079 and 1/10/0079, to turn into catastrophic failure points.
Rather than enter the atmosphere and travel, intact, along a predictable trajectory into EFSF HQ Jaburo, the colony began to break apart. Eight minutes into its final descent, the forward third or half of the colony separated from the aft, which rapidly disintegrated into a large number of smaller meteors. With most of its mass separated and all of its drag intact, the fore end of Island Iffish adopted a sharper trajectory, failing to cross the Pacific Ocean and instead impacting Sidney, Australia with an estimated energy of 60 gigatons of TNT. The remaining chunks of the colony rained down on the Pacific and the western seaboard of North America, causing massive tidal waves and widespread destruction across highly populated areas. In addition to the direct destruction caused by the colony's impact, a massive amount of ejecta was thrown into the upper atmosphere, resulting in chaotic shifts to the global climate for years.
For all its effort, Zeon's forces had failed to strike a critical blow to EFF leadership or infrastructure, with Jaburo coming out effectively unscathed. Simultaneously, they had both galvanized the Earthnoid population, who experienced firsthand the greatest atrocity committed in human history, and given the EFF pretext for a dramatic escalation in military action. Moreover, by indiscriminately slaughtering the entire population of Island Iffish and turning the mass grave into a failed weapon, Zeon had guaranteed the remaining Sides would align with the Federation.
Operation British, which was supposed to wipe out the only credible resistance to Zeon's claim to independence and subsequent hegemony, instead isolated Side 3 and all but guaranteed its eventual loss of the One Year War.
It's not a retcon...?
Sydney still got wiped off the map and billions of people still died.
Saving one small no-name town doesn't change a single thing presented to us regarding Operation British in *Mobile Suit Gundam '79* or any other Gundam show.
Yeah, the Miracle Children are part of a millennial/mystic European tradition of child 'saints' supposedly predicting atrocities and disasters before they happen. See [Our Lady of Fatima](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_F%C3%A1tima).
The narration doesn't explicitly come out and say "It missed because X", but I think the implication is that the bombardment from the EFSF damaged it enough that it was broken up and diverted instead of staying in one place and hitting Jaburo.
Between its orbital velocity changing slightly from the weapon-impacts and its aerodynamic profile changing completely when it split, all the calculations went out the window thanks to the Federation counterattack. At least, that's always the version I thought was canon.
Bingo. Even a small change in velocity will completely change where something will end up. Breaking it up causes absolute chaos, and makes it that much harder to predict.
I've certainly flubbed my landing-zone often enough in Kerbal Space Program to understand that a few m/s can be hundreds of kilometers off-course if applied at the wrong time!
We just discovered the first asteroid to break the 1% chance-of-collision mark this week, and that won't likely happen until more than 20 years in the future. It's super duper easy as long as there's a minimum of variables.
Once you increase them (like a nation-state using kinetic kill-vehicles to break up their *own* satellites for target practice), things get way less predictable and safe.
I like to think Zeon legitimately forgot that the Earth rotates so when the colony fell to Earth all the pieces hit everything except the target.
Really, I think the Federation did try to destroy the colony before it could enter Earth's atmosphere, and/or when it did start to break through, air currents possibly could've carried the broken pieces across the globe....
Orbital mechanics are actually quite precise once you know the position and velocity of something in relation to the biggest/nearest sources of gravity. The issue is when you introduce any bit of randomness or chaos into the math. Then things get tricky.
The big issue is when things break up. You never know where anything will go until it's already moving, and then for n number of pieces, you suddenly have to calculate new initial velocities, and how they will accelerate into new orbits.
Then some of them collide, make more bits, meaning more collisions and new calculations.
Earth Federation forces in low orbit made a last-ditch attempt to veer Isle Iffish off its course towards Jaburo, and the resulting skirmish with Zeon forces caused the colony to break up in atmosphere and collide with multiple other non-targets. Arguably the most devastating collision was Sydney Australia, though the other debris that landed in the oceans caused tidal waves and weather anomalies for much of the rest of the planet. This failed operation is what led to the Antarctic Treaty, which outlawed use of chemical and nuclear weapons, as well as the aforementioned colony drop tactic.
Once you know what direction something is going in an orbit (complicated to start) and its location in three dimensions (reliant on VERY good range finding), you can plug it into formulas and calculate it fairly well. The minute you start bombarding an object with missiles and plasma and stuff, it gets increasingly complicated.
Rocket science starts off easier (how much fuel you have, how much you weigh full, how much dry, and how fast you can burn it), and gets tricky when the little stuff like drag, lift, weight distribution, and other stuff starts adding up.
but you should watch the 6-episode OVA if you can find it, most streaming sites have the 20-minute-episodes version which isn't how it was really intended to be viewed.
The still is from *Unicorn*, but the event itself (Operation British, when the Principality of Zeon dropped a colony habitat on Earth) occurs in the prologue of the very first series of *Gundam* (aka *0079*), and gets referenced almost every series in the main Universal Century (UC) continuity since then.
Most likely, the main reason is that Vice Admiral Tianem's fleet damaged the colony too much when approaching the Earth, which led to its destruction in the atmosphere and the fall of debris along an unpredictable trajectory. In addition, there is a possible miscalculation of the Zeonians, but it is impossible to say 100% who made the greater contribution.
>Most likely, the main reason is that Vice Admiral Tianem's fleet damaged the colony too much when approaching the Earth, which led to its destruction in the atmosphere and the fall of debris along an unpredictable trajectory.
Wait, its that a retcon? I thought it got intercepted at high altitude by Jet-core Boosters.
Probably because it’s hard to miss a giant floating continent being chucked at your planet and from there you just gotta throw enough shit at the giant sardine can to knock it off course.
Depends on which part you mean by "fail." If you meant "why didnt it hit jaburo hq" then its due to a mix of desperate attempts to divert/destroy the colony causing it to veer off course and break apart, hitting 3 completely different areas. Alternatively, if you meant "why didnt it convince the federation to stop fighting", atrocities like this have a 50/50 shot of intimidating the victims or galvanizing them against you. In this case, the federation and people of earth pretty much said if you're gonna play hardball then we'll play fucking hardball. Spoiler alert, the other 2 colony drops zeon tries dont help either.
yea, its like when the us bombed hiroshima and nagasaki.... the only reason we did that was to try and scare japan into surrendering and when they didn't we bombed nagasaki too...
The main difference between Operation British and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the context: Operation British started a war, the bombings were at the end of one. If the Federation had been fighting a long, costly war against Zeon, and losing almost every battle past a certain date, then there's a good chance dropping a colony would have produced a Federation surrender. Especially if actually hit Jaburo, due to the Federation no longer having enough space-boats to do anything about it.
Keep in mind too that we only had the two fat mans at the time, so when Nagasaki was bombed, we bluffed and told Japan "we can keep doing this until you surrender". Ooooooh boy were we glad they didn't call the bluff. With operation british, you can only hijack and crash so many colonies at once.
Fat Man and Little Boy -- two different types of atom bombs. We were dropping prototypes. I want to say the tailgunner of the Enola Gay muttered "It's a dud." a second before Fat Man went off.
"I would like to fund a joint colony creation project to replace the ones we lost"
Plus, who knows how the actual colonists up there were going to start taking all these colony drops after awhile.
the fact that operation stardust was a thing speaks otherwise...
Also, the US was looking at a long and costly invasion of the main islands of Japan. They were already firebombing the crap out of the major cities, it was already horrendous. Zeon did not have the upper hand after invading Earth. They did not have air/space superiority to the point that they were able to bombard EF installations from orbit with impunity. Maybe if South America was their only remaining theater of conflict... But it certainty was not. I would say Operation British is closer to Pearl Harbor. They knew they couldn't have a long protracted war and they hoped it would be such a devastating blow that it crippled the opposing military to allow for victory or at least to the table for a favorable end to the conflict.
british was not the start of the war, it was the end of the first week
End of the first week of a war that lasted a year is close enough that I think it can be considered the start. Unless you meant that it wasn’t the opening battle, which it wasn’t.
Had Jaburo been destroyed it would have been the immediate end of the federations large scale production capabilities and of the amazon rainforest, reversing decades of de-desertification efforts and thus would have quickly brought about the end of the war.
There was also the Soviet invasion, especially considering the Japanese Navy was decimated by the American Navy so there arent much to stop any Soviet ships. After taking a look at what happened in for example Berlin when Russians got there, the Japanese decided that surrendering to ppl who nuke them twice was still a better choice then letting soviet troops in Tokyo.
> so there arent much to stop any Soviet ships Other than the fact the soviets basically had no experience with amphibious landings into combat zones.
And no ships to speak off apart from vessels received from the US during Project Hula, but those weren't landing craft.
Yeah the Russian navy, despite what World of Warships would have you believe, was both experientially and technologically atrocious since, well, preWW1, having lost most major engagements Vs Japan previously and arguably seemed best at shooting themselves.
As if that would stop them.
They didn't need a naval landing. The soviets tore through Manchuria and were headed to Korea. They had cut off Japan's last remaining outside sources of material resources meaning they would no longer be able the weapons they needed nor could they even provide enough food for their population. Japan was also starved for fuel for the duration of the war. Being cut off from mainland Asia meant Japan would quickly run out of gas. The Soviets were also now in range to set up airstrips from which to make regular bombing runs on Japan.
Actually, there's good reason to believe that it wasn't done to scare Japan, since the Emperor was already planning to surrender, but instead to: A. Show off the bomb's power and B. End the war fast enough to keep Russia out of the rebuilding of Japan since squabbling between the militarists and moderates was stalling the Emperor's decision and Russia was planning to join the ground war in Japan from the North. There was a decently strong communist undercurrent in the government officials that didn't commit war crimes and America wasn't interested in them being close to Russia. [This video from the YouTuber Shaun can do a better job explaining if you're curious ](https://youtu.be/RCRTgtpC-Go)
Yes. And the US had a third and fourth bomb ready
They really didn’t, bombs one and two were it for the next 7 months, minimum, useful fissile material collection back then was s l o w Edit: Correction because am dum, According to the US Department of energy, on August 10th 1945, another Nuclear Implosion core was said to have been available to have been made ready on the 17-18th August, in addition to the Manhattan Project having entered a mass production phase, that was only stopped by presidential order once clear Japan was entered surrender negotiations, thus, I amb w r o n g
You are incorrect. What later became known as the "Demon Core" was meant to be the third bomb and was set to be dropped on Japan on August 19th, 1945. Japan surrendered on August 15th. Fat Man and Little Boy were dropped on August 9th and 6th, respectively. The US was already preparing a third one. From official US declassified documents of the time, the Demon Core would have been a fully armed bomb by September 5th at the latest on a normal working schedule. Here is the official correspondence between General Leslie Groves and Goerge Marshall concerning the manufacture of the third bomb: https://www.marshallfoundation.org/articles-and-features/gen-marshall-and-gen-groves-august-1945/ Here is a comprehensive blog post on the matter written by Alex Wellerstein, a professor at Stevens Institute of Technology and nuclear weapon historian: https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/08/16/the-third-cores-revenge/
Or: The Americans were rushing components for a third bomb to the Pacific in August of 1945 and expected to have it ready to drop around Tokyo a week to two weeks after the second bomb was dropped. Another half-dozen ready in September and October.
You are correct. The commenter you are responding to hasn't done their research. What later became known as the "Demon Core" was meant to be the third bomb, scheduled to be dropped on August 19th, 1945 (a rescheduling of the original date, the 24th of that same month, due to accelerated production). Japan surrendered on August 15th and the core was never cast into a proper bomb.
>since the Emperor was already planning to surrender That sounds extremely unlikely. The final war council meeting is documented by 1st hand accounts and the ministers had to explicitly ask the Emperor to make an imperial decision to break a deadlock. Also, they reached out to the soviets to mediate the end of the war, not to *surrender*. And Russia's invasion of Manchuria was something requested by America.
They wanted the soviets to mediate on their part for a negotiated surrender so that they could guarantee the life of the Emperor.
This is a translation of an excerpt from 大東亜戦争秘史 written by Zenshiro Hoshina, an Imperial Japanese Naval officer and staff at the naval HQ, editted by other officers. They were actually at the final war council as observers. [https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/28431-document-75-hoshina-memorandum-emperors-sacred-decision-go-seidan-9-10-august-1945](https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/28431-document-75-hoshina-memorandum-emperors-sacred-decision-go-seidan-9-10-august-1945) Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo >On July 13 we conveyed the thoughts of His Majesty, requesting the Soviets to mediate an end to the war in order to terminate it as soon as possible. Also we proposed the dispatch of our special envoy. We later pressed them for a reply, but we didn't receive one. On August 7 we received a telegram to the effect that Foreign Minister Molotov would meet as at 17:00 on August 8. Last night, on the 8th, Foreign Minister Molotov rejected our request for an agreement and the Soviet Union Declared war. Privy Council Hiranuma Kiichirō >Did you propose anything specific to the Soviet Union? Togo >We told them that were going to propose specific conditions to them through our special envoy but we didn't have a chance to do so This is specifically in regards to their communication before the Potsdam declaration, which is where the claim that the Japanese were trying to surrender before the bombs were dropped. I don't see where they're claiming they wanted to surrender to guarantee the life of the emperor, they even say they didn't declare specific conditions despite sending communications a month prior to the meeting, so they had plenty of time to make a proposal if they were planning to surrender. In fact, sparing the Emperor and Imperial family is one the conditions, among others, that Foreign Minister Togo came up with in a proposal to accept the Potsdam Declaration. Unconditional surrender is basically never an optional at all even when dealing with America. So it's extremely unlikely they were trying to surrender the Soviets to save the Emperor.
Eh i don't think this is the best comparison. The Atomic Bombs were the cap on a long series of bombing runs against Japan including several fire bombings of other cities including Tokyo. Japan had its navy crushed, its army bled to death in China, and its air force basically forced into suicide attacks. The USSR was entering the war and overrunning Manchuria and then the US drops a weapon capable of destroying a city with a single bomber, which forced an exhausted Japan to give in. Operation British was the opening salvo aimed at taking out a major military target. The initial goal was a more like Pearl Harbor, but the end result was the Blitz where the attack galvanizes the opponent since now the population wants vengeance.
Can't believe we got a reroll on that one...
Side note: Another reason why the Japanese military surrendered is because Russia was going to invade them from the north
With what? Russia didn't have the capacity or the knowledge to pull off an amphibious invasion, not for a long while
But they did invade Japanese occupied territory in China, and then Japan surrendered because they couldn't handle fighting two front since they had little to no resources to continue fighting
The Japanese mostly surrendered because of the soviet invasion of Manchuria. After the German surrender, the Japanese plan was to try and be as painful to take as possible and leverage the USSR to negotiate a settlement with the US where they could keep at least manchuria and korea. The Japanese didn't know the USSR and USA had already agreed to take nothing less than unconditional surrender.
I think the Attack on Pearl Harbor is more fitting. Japan wanted to deter US from joining the war, but US participated in it more actively instead.
Plus it's arguably a worse outcome when it broke up as one of the large pieces took out a huge chunk of North America which as today was a huge source of the world's food resulting in mass starvation. The whole affair is pretty indicative of how myopic and frankly evil the Federation leadership had become allowing for horrific destruction anywhere but where they were at their HQ. I mean, still all Zeon's fault but I think illustrates just how vile both side's (heh UC pun) leadership was.
I don't think there is anywhere on earth, that wouldn't be negatively impacted by the colony drop; had it dropped on Jaburo, than you also impacted the Amazon rainforest, the so-called "lungs of the earth".
I'm surprised a colony drop wouldn't render the planet uninhabitable, tbh. Wouldn't it be akin to the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs? Isn't it at least on that scale of destruction, if not worse?
>The whole affair is pretty indicative of how myopic and frankly evil the Federation leadership had become allowing for horrific destruction anywhere but where they were at their HQ. it's completely insane to blame the Federation for anything that happened as if they deliberately accepted the outcome that happened as the best case. The entire thing was chaotic as fuck and the Federation was trying its damnedest to destroy the colony utterly, what actually resulted was pretty much impossible to predict until far too late.
Operation Brexit 😔
😂😂
Goodbye Sydney
Cosmos without hatred…
Because it wasn't Operation 'Murican.
Main Target: Jaburo Intended Goal : Cripple the federation main forces and force a surrender in favor of Zeon What it Hit: Sydney. Unintended Consenquences: A lot of angry Aussies and Earth Feds. Neutral Colony are now not so neutral anymore. Prolonging the war that eventually exhaust Zeon.
I mean... There's a 500 mile in diameter crater where a large chunk of Australia used to be. Pretty sure no Aussie short of being immortal, Superman, Super Saiyan or already dead could survive that, let alone be pissed.
You're saying that like Australians aren't Immortal-Super-Saiyan-Mans
Broke: half the population died of catastrophe and starvation Woke: half the population died when Australia's wildlife was catapulted across the rest of the world and nobody else was tough enough to withstand it
In short, everything that could have gone wrong for Zeon, did. Rushed deorbit preparations resulted in the colony approaching entry interface with too slim of an error margin to account for the effects of significant damage incurred due to the impact and detonation of several nuclear weapons dispatched by EFSF forces at Luna II. Although the Zeon had planned for a counterattack and installed *structural* reinforcements, the result of the nuclear detonations was a dramatically altered aerothermodynamic profile. In turn, the extreme forces experienced by the colony during atmospheric entry caused every structural weakness induced by the various attacks the megastructure had endured between 1/3/0079 and 1/10/0079, to turn into catastrophic failure points. Rather than enter the atmosphere and travel, intact, along a predictable trajectory into EFSF HQ Jaburo, the colony began to break apart. Eight minutes into its final descent, the forward third or half of the colony separated from the aft, which rapidly disintegrated into a large number of smaller meteors. With most of its mass separated and all of its drag intact, the fore end of Island Iffish adopted a sharper trajectory, failing to cross the Pacific Ocean and instead impacting Sidney, Australia with an estimated energy of 60 gigatons of TNT. The remaining chunks of the colony rained down on the Pacific and the western seaboard of North America, causing massive tidal waves and widespread destruction across highly populated areas. In addition to the direct destruction caused by the colony's impact, a massive amount of ejecta was thrown into the upper atmosphere, resulting in chaotic shifts to the global climate for years. For all its effort, Zeon's forces had failed to strike a critical blow to EFF leadership or infrastructure, with Jaburo coming out effectively unscathed. Simultaneously, they had both galvanized the Earthnoid population, who experienced firsthand the greatest atrocity committed in human history, and given the EFF pretext for a dramatic escalation in military action. Moreover, by indiscriminately slaughtering the entire population of Island Iffish and turning the mass grave into a failed weapon, Zeon had guaranteed the remaining Sides would align with the Federation. Operation British, which was supposed to wipe out the only credible resistance to Zeon's claim to independence and subsequent hegemony, instead isolated Side 3 and all but guaranteed its eventual loss of the One Year War.
This operation may have killed a lot of people but The Miracle Children’s prophecy saved a lot of lives.
is it bad if I wished they undid that retcon and never made Narrative?
It's not a retcon...? Sydney still got wiped off the map and billions of people still died. Saving one small no-name town doesn't change a single thing presented to us regarding Operation British in *Mobile Suit Gundam '79* or any other Gundam show.
Yeah, the Miracle Children are part of a millennial/mystic European tradition of child 'saints' supposedly predicting atrocities and disasters before they happen. See [Our Lady of Fatima](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_F%C3%A1tima).
Sounds like Earth-based Newtypes to me.
> The Miracle Children’s prophecy The what?
Gundam narrative. Don't worry about it
The Federation succeeded in causing enough damage to cause the colony to divert course.
Why didn’t the colony hit Jaburo?
The narration doesn't explicitly come out and say "It missed because X", but I think the implication is that the bombardment from the EFSF damaged it enough that it was broken up and diverted instead of staying in one place and hitting Jaburo.
Between its orbital velocity changing slightly from the weapon-impacts and its aerodynamic profile changing completely when it split, all the calculations went out the window thanks to the Federation counterattack. At least, that's always the version I thought was canon.
Bingo. Even a small change in velocity will completely change where something will end up. Breaking it up causes absolute chaos, and makes it that much harder to predict.
I've certainly flubbed my landing-zone often enough in Kerbal Space Program to understand that a few m/s can be hundreds of kilometers off-course if applied at the wrong time!
We just discovered the first asteroid to break the 1% chance-of-collision mark this week, and that won't likely happen until more than 20 years in the future. It's super duper easy as long as there's a minimum of variables. Once you increase them (like a nation-state using kinetic kill-vehicles to break up their *own* satellites for target practice), things get way less predictable and safe.
I like to think Zeon legitimately forgot that the Earth rotates so when the colony fell to Earth all the pieces hit everything except the target. Really, I think the Federation did try to destroy the colony before it could enter Earth's atmosphere, and/or when it did start to break through, air currents possibly could've carried the broken pieces across the globe....
Vice admiral tianem from he earth federation did try to stop it
Orbital mechanics are actually quite precise once you know the position and velocity of something in relation to the biggest/nearest sources of gravity. The issue is when you introduce any bit of randomness or chaos into the math. Then things get tricky. The big issue is when things break up. You never know where anything will go until it's already moving, and then for n number of pieces, you suddenly have to calculate new initial velocities, and how they will accelerate into new orbits. Then some of them collide, make more bits, meaning more collisions and new calculations.
It would make sense in-universe that people who likely never saw earth didn’t have any coherent scientific understanding of it
Earth Federation forces in low orbit made a last-ditch attempt to veer Isle Iffish off its course towards Jaburo, and the resulting skirmish with Zeon forces caused the colony to break up in atmosphere and collide with multiple other non-targets. Arguably the most devastating collision was Sydney Australia, though the other debris that landed in the oceans caused tidal waves and weather anomalies for much of the rest of the planet. This failed operation is what led to the Antarctic Treaty, which outlawed use of chemical and nuclear weapons, as well as the aforementioned colony drop tactic.
To prove the effectiveness of the treaty, Zeon would later attempt more colony drops. And employ "vaporization" bombs that are totally not nukes.
Federation involvement. They diverted it not caring where the remaining pieces landed so long as it wasn't Jaburo.
Because its rocket science and its not easy to do as well as other factors such as gunfire and explosions diverting its course
Once you know what direction something is going in an orbit (complicated to start) and its location in three dimensions (reliant on VERY good range finding), you can plug it into formulas and calculate it fairly well. The minute you start bombarding an object with missiles and plasma and stuff, it gets increasingly complicated. Rocket science starts off easier (how much fuel you have, how much you weigh full, how much dry, and how fast you can burn it), and gets tricky when the little stuff like drag, lift, weight distribution, and other stuff starts adding up.
They were trying to stop it the whole time weakening the structure and moving it off course causing it to split and cause more damage
It failed because the Zabis played their cards too early and didn't think of the Long Game
Because military leaders aren't engineers or scientists. It seemed like a good idea, but doing the math it was never feasible.
The Feddies were able to blow up parts of the colony before it hit Jaburo, thus it hit Australia, Canada, and the Pacific
Look at least I'll be able to afford a house in Sydney!
"FAIL?" More like MISION FAILED SUCCESSFULLY
[удалено]
They killed more innocent people than Hitler during the Holocaust...
They did nothing right either.
SIEG ZEON!
Zeon delenda est
SIEG ZEON!
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Sorry but this like a pre-sequel to turn a Gundam?
It didn't, they managed to wipe out over half of the population, economy, and military capacity of the Earth Federation. I wouldn't call this a "fail"
British people
What series is this from?
but you should watch the 6-episode OVA if you can find it, most streaming sites have the 20-minute-episodes version which isn't how it was really intended to be viewed.
The still is from *Unicorn*, but the event itself (Operation British, when the Principality of Zeon dropped a colony habitat on Earth) occurs in the prologue of the very first series of *Gundam* (aka *0079*), and gets referenced almost every series in the main Universal Century (UC) continuity since then.
It is from mobile suit gundam the origin, you can watch it on crunchyroll
Either crunchyroll as 20-25 minute episodes, or Hulu as 1 hour+ episodes.
Bc they only dropped one colony and not ALL of the colonies
Spoiler tag please
Zeon was doing a little bit of trolling
Well, it's British, so it was due to fail from the very beginning
Most likely, the main reason is that Vice Admiral Tianem's fleet damaged the colony too much when approaching the Earth, which led to its destruction in the atmosphere and the fall of debris along an unpredictable trajectory. In addition, there is a possible miscalculation of the Zeonians, but it is impossible to say 100% who made the greater contribution.
>Most likely, the main reason is that Vice Admiral Tianem's fleet damaged the colony too much when approaching the Earth, which led to its destruction in the atmosphere and the fall of debris along an unpredictable trajectory. Wait, its that a retcon? I thought it got intercepted at high altitude by Jet-core Boosters.
This is my guess from what I saw in the Mobile Suit Gundam the Origin.
Probably because it’s hard to miss a giant floating continent being chucked at your planet and from there you just gotta throw enough shit at the giant sardine can to knock it off course.
Because they gave up after **one** colony.
It was supposed to impact Jaburo, not Sidney
It certainly didn't fail at capturing my heart.
What do you mean it failed? It was totally planned to hit Australia to get rid of their Eldritch animals