Bandai 131412 Mobile POD Ball 

The RB-79 Ball is a fictional weapon from the anime series Mobile Suit Gundam.

Technology & Combat Characteristics

The Federation refitted about 1200 of the civilian-model worker space pods, known as SP-W03 Space Pods. The Federation reinforced it with heavier armor and mounted a 180mm recoilless cannon on top. The Ball mobile pod also had vernier thrusters mounted all along the body.

A standard EFSF combat team would consist of 3 RGM-79 GMs and 2 Balls to counter Zeon's 3-MS tactical units, though other formations have been seen; Ball-only teams of 1 RB-79K and 2 RB-79 launched from a Salamis-class cruiser, and various large formations launched from Columbus-class ships.

The directional thrusters mounted on all Ball units were "directed" solid fuel explosives, the detonation giving an impulse through the thrusters to change the direction of the Ball. This configuration gave the Ball unit good reaction speed and reasonable maneuverability on each thrust but very limited use of the system compared to the liquid fueled directional thrusters on mobile suits.

The Ball units had an advantage when it came to refueling on board the Columbus-class support vessel due to the lack of beam weapons and low number of liquid fuel thrusters, making the refueling/rearming time extremely short compared to any Mobile Suit that runs on thermo-nuclear power. In fact, the thrusters and weapons were designed to be modular, allowing depleted thruster banks and empty gun magazines to literally be removed by the servicing crew to be reloaded at a later time, and fully-loaded ones to be quickly installed in their place.

At first, the Ball was seen as ill-suited for combat. It had limited ammo, relatively thin (though emplaced in a ballistically-sound manner and moderately sloped to assist projectile deflection) armors, and lacked the AMBAC system or any sort of close-in weapon other than its manipulator claws. The most famous battle involving Balls was Operation Star-One, an operation undertaken to further pressure Zeon into retreating from Earth after the Federation took the upper hand following Odessa. Since the GM was not yet ready, over 1000 Balls were committed along with Salamis-class and Magellan-class warships. Their numbers overwhelmed the Zeon fleets and drove them away, but countless RB-79s were destroyed during what turned out to be one of the most brutal battles for the Federation. Soon after, the Ball earned the nickname "Mobile Coffin" among EFSF pilots. It is sometimes joked that (in Gundam 0079) the only time a Ball ever hit anything was when one is kicked into a GM by a Zaku II.

However, some statistics on the unit counters this view of the Ball unit being weak - in fact, it had a specification superior to many of their opponents. The Ball was smaller than the average mobile suits, which not only made it a more difficult target to hit than a GM but also made it lighter as well as gave it a higher acceleration rate than most contemporary mobile suits. All of the supposedly very powerful mobile armors, save for a few Newtype units, had lower mass-thrust ratios (i.e. acceleration) than the Ball unit. All the earlier model space-combat mobile suits, specifically the Zakus and Rick Dom, had inferior acceleration and less sensor range. This gave the Ball unit a very good advantage in hit-and-run tactics even when not supporting GMs. The Ball's real advantage came from both numbers and cost. The Ball cost about 1/4 of a RGM-79 (next to nothing to the EFSF) and was heavily mass-produced, becoming a support unit for warships and RGM-79 GM's during the One Year War. The RB-79(G) was intended as a close-range escort for teams of the longer-ranged artillery units - the (G) variant is seen fielded in a 1/2 ratio with the standard Ball in MS Igloo.