Okay so I got bored...sort of. There are a lot of numbers bounded around in episode 7 about mobile suits being either destroyed or knocked out so I decided to have a look and see if it tots up.

Over the course of the battle, starting with a scout spotting the Gundams, the following mobile suits are seen on screen:

Moralia (Red) - 15 Hellion
PMC (Gray/Blue) - 54 Hellion
Al Sarshes Team - 1 Enact, 6 Hellion
AEU (Green) - 24 Hellion, 1 Enact
Total: 99 Hellions and 2 Enacts


The Meisters do the following amount of damage:

Alleujah
AEU - 10
PMC - 6
Moralia - 1

Lockon
PMC - 10
Moralia - 1

Tieria
AEU - 7
PMC - 12
Moralia - 5

Setsuna
PMC - 12
Moralia - 3

That's 17 AEU Hellions, 40 PMC Hellions and 10 Moralian Hellions. Or 67 in total.

After "Phase One" was complete the nice chaps at the Moralian Military HQ inform us that their mobile suits forces had suffered "32 shot down and 26 heavily damaged". I'm guessing that they lumped their own teams in with the PMC because they only had 15 Hellions on screen let alone 58. They go on to say that 15 AEU Hellions have been shot down which is close to what I got...so fog of war and all that.

A little later JNN tells us that 68 mobile suits were either destroyed or heavily damaged which is spookily close to what I got which is probably the first time ever. So make that of what you will. A bit short of the 528 I identified previously.

I was thrown by the numbers too... thats partially why I was so geared up for this fight... 500 + Mobile Suits versus the Gundams.

However, it turned out to be much less... not even a fifth of what we expected...

It is verbally confirmed in episode 6 that the CB expect more than 130 mobile suits being involved in the exercise. So the 67 the "allies" lose is just over half that figure. I think the 99 seen on screen clearly don't cover the entirety of the Hellion force. They clearly had more but I don't they actually had anywhere near the 500+ counted at one point, I think that was just an animation flub.

Animators using "Ctrl V" a little too much, eh?

Still, the numbers mentioned in the series seem off. Perhaps part of this is because of the skipped phases?

Possibly. I think there is no doubting that the "Allies" got a serious mauling after just Phase One; which is where the "32 shot down and 26 heavily damaged" statement comes from.

I've just totted up that about 20 Hellions are taken out during the Final Phase of the Plan. From my counting that suggests that only 47 Hellions were lost previously. However that doesn't tally with what is said.

We may wish to take the Moralian officer's word as more or less fact and take it that 58 Moralian/PMC Hellions are knocked out during he first phase together with 15 AEU Hellions. So 73 in total. Add in the 20 from the final phase and 93 suits have gone down. A much more devastating results I'm sure you'll agree.

The JNN news report must have been a spot of spin to try and make the defeat not seem so humiliating.

Well, it's also fairly chaotic. Moralia itself was defeated in less than a few hours; An entire country put to its knees by four units.

...Okay, so maybe spinning to reduce the humiliation isn't out of the question. :lol:

Hey it happens all the time out there in the real world. Enemy losses get rounded up, your losses get rounded down. What really sucks is when there are no enemy losses to report.... ^^;

I like the slightly disparate numbers, though. Nice bit of realism, since in-story the various observers would not have 100% knowledge of the battle, or even be giving priority to the same category of losses.