Gundam 00 – The State of GN Drives

Warning: HUGE spoilers for Gundam 00 S2 episode 25 ahead.

This is basically a write-up examining whether certain GN Drives got destroyed at the end of the final episode of Gundam 00.

Above is the schematic of 00 Gundam’s GN Drives from the 1/100’s booklet. This is, to date, the only schematic we’ve gotten showing the assembly of a GN Drive. From this drawing we can conclude the two “crucial” parts of the GN Drive are the Solar Furnace and the TD Blanket.

A quick note on GN Drive Components: The Solar Furnace and TD Blanket’s independent functions have never been explicitly stated. It is made clear that this is a component unique to true GN Drives however, so this leaves two possibilities as for how their configuration works:
1. The Solar Furnace generates unlimited amounts of energy, and the TD Blanket converts this energy into GN Particles.
2. The Solar Furnace generates unlimited amounts of GN Particles, which the TD Blanket “filters” into GN Particles that can be used.

There were some fake spoilers out a while back stating that #2 was the case, and in my opinion, this is the far more likely of the two cases. So, when we consider that the Solar Furnace is an infinite energy source, and when we consider the fact that Topological Defects, as far as the ones that exist in reality, aren’t things you can just make, we can assume that the “unique” part of a GN Drive, and thus the irreplaceable part, consists of the TD Blanket and the Solar Furnace.

A bit of a side note: GN Tau Drives work by essentially converting regular energy into GN Particles without the aid of a TD Blanket. To use a metaphor, a Gundam is a piece of electronics running by being plugged into the wall, whereas a GN-X is one running off of rechargeable batteries.

When we saw Nadleeh’s GN Drive in episode 25 of the first season it is significantly larger than, for instance, any of 00’s. This is presumably because that pod you see there contains the Solar Furnace, TD Blanket, a number of other components, plus systems to guide the drive back to the Ptolemy/Assault Container. The last one is a certainty. After all, think about it for a moment… If the GN Drive that Tieria released didn’t have any sort of thrusters or guidance systems, what was the point? If it didn’t have any of those systems, it would just sit there with him and Nadleeh, negating the purpose of releasing it at all.

Now that we’ve established that, let’s get to the whole point of this post… The state of the GN Drives after episode 25, or rather, the state of the Solar Furnaces and TD Blankets. The only drives which we can say with certainty survived were the ones within Cherudim and Arios, given the damage that each received. Cherudim’s GN Drive sits on the back of its waist and was untouched, whereas Arios’s is in its pelvis, which remained undamaged.

So first lets cover Seraphim:

There are two issues here. The first is that we don’t know how deep within Seraphim its Solar Furnace and TD Blanket are located, and thus whether or not the shot from the Reborn Cannon hit either. The second issue is we have never seen a Gundam (at least a true GN Drive Gundam) explode like this. So is just up to these two questions:

1. Did the beam hit the Solar Furnace or TD Blanket?
2. Can the Solar Furnace and TD Blanket survive an explosion like that?

I’m inclined to think that regardless of the answer to #1, the answer to #2 is no. Make your own judgements though.

On to 0 Gundam:

As you can see above, all Ribbons did was put the entire GN Drive assembly from 00 onto the 0 Gundam, thus we actually KNOW where the TD Blanket and Solar Furnace are on it.

When the 0 Gundam is stabbed, we can see the blade clearly penetrating through the back of the GN Drive assembly. Looking at the schematic at the top of this post, the 0 Gundam’s Solar Furnace and TD Blanket was almost certainly punctured. Add that to the explosion it produced, scattering GN Particles, it looks like this one is almost certainly out of the game.

Exia:

As you can see in the first picture, Exia has a different cone assembly from the 00, meaning that Setsuna had to remove the Solar Furnace and TD Blanket from the 00 and put them in the Exia. Because of this, we really can’t be sure how deep into that assembly the Solar Furnace and TD Blanket are.

When you examine how Exia was stabbed, it is uncertain if this could have hit either of the crucial components. This is the most foggy of the three, however I’m going to lean towards no mainly due to the fact that the point of entry and the point of exit (although we only get one really bad view of it) are very similar to the damage Exia suffered at the hands of the GN Flag. So assuming the mounting of the Solar Furnace and TD Blanket are the same in the Exia R2 as they were in Exia, its GN Drive’s components likely survived.

And that concludes my obsessive look at this.

A few other fun GN Drive observations/facts for the road:

It’s somewhat uncertain which suit had which drive in the final battle. We got this shot of the incomplete 00 in episode one, however when 00 launched for the first time, when Setsuna stated that 0 Gundam and Exia were with him, the GN Drives shown on screen were reversed. I’m just assuming the above picture is correct and the two pilots ended up with their original drives for the sake of symbolism and whatnot.

This is also rather important as it means there is still a chance for another Twin Drive unit, as every combination of every Gundam EXCEPT Exia didn’t work with the 0 Gundam’s GN Drive, so theoretically a Twin Drive system could be established with Exia’s GN Drive and another one of the GN Drives.

I’m not so sure what Exia was doing here, but it was sweet. The bars holding the GN Drive in place pivoted outwards and the drive actually expanded away from Exia. From the visuals, it was releasing far more particles when it did this… Perhaps it is a sort of lesser Trans-Am? Hopefully we’ll get an explanation for this later, although odds are all it really did was provide extra linear thrust.