RB-133 Type 133 Ball

The RB-133 Type 133 Ball was a derivative of the original Ball deployed by the Earth Federation.

More than sixty years after the One Year War, the Federation revived the mobile pod concept in UC 0133.

History

At the beginning of the One Year War with the Principality of Zeon, the Federation lacked any sort of mobile suits while the Zeon forces held the upper hand in the war with their mobile suits.

The Federation developed a prototype mobile suit, the RX-78-2 Gundam, but it was too costly to be mass produced. Their first mass-production mobile suit, the RGM-79 GM, was not produced fast enough to be deployed at all battle fronts. Thus, the Federation refitted around 1,200 civilian-use SP-W03 Space Pods to be deployed in combat.

More than sixty years later, the Federation reintroduced the mobile pod concept and built the Type 133 Ball.

As an improvised conversion, the original Ball was initially seen as ill-suited for combat. It earned the unfavourable nickname “Mobile Coffin” among Earth Federation Space Force (EFSF) pilots. Despite the Ball’s bad reputation, the Type 133 Ball was put into use in the second Universal Century because of its low production cost and the relative ease of pilot training compared to mobile suits.

Design

The RB-133 Type 133 Ball is similar to the RB-79 Ball but it is mounted with three 120 mm recoilless cannons instead of just one 180 mm cannon. It also has a pair of 30 mm vulcan guns mounted on its body for close range combat, an area where the original Ball was sorely lacking.

Despite the improvements over the original Ball, the Type 133 Ball was still considered ill-suited for combat.

Variants

Behind the scenes

Yuichi Hasegawa is the original mechanical designer.

Appearance