Published in the west by Tokyopop
Price - $12.99 (US) - Find it on www.amazon.com or www.amazon.co.uk

Technical Manuals Overview

These are small pocket sized books released in the west by Tokyopop. They are translated versions of books from the Data Collections series in Japan, which were rehashings of the superior Entertainment Bibles. Each technical manual comes in standard English format, left to right and front to back, with roughly half of it devoted to a colour section for lineart and half in black & white, mainly text with illustrations and extra lineart. Several of the books have a few mislabelled illustrations in the black and white section and some mistranslated text (usually quite obvious if you know the subject matter).

What's in the book

The second Technical Manual is where this series of books begins for the UC fans. The title is slightly misleading as the book in fact covers Mobile Suits outside of those featured in 08th MS Team and events throughout and surrounding the entire One Year War. The colour lineart section is a great improvement over that found in the Gundam Wing manual. The print quality, whilst perhaps not as perfect as you'd wish for, is very good. The colour lineart is printed properly, with proper coherent colour printing and little to no loss of line integrity and detail. The other lineart in the colour section is equally clear. Every mobile suit from 08th MS Team is given a page or two with extra lineart you won't have seen online. As a bonus, however, lineart and information is given for some Mobile Suit Gundam, MS-V, MS-X and 0080 suits where appropriate. The Gouf Custom, for example, is followed by all the Goufs produced after the production model, up to the flight type seen in 08th MS Team. The textual information and specs is once again less than you get from MAHQ, with one or two errors (such as giving the Gouf Custom Luna Titanium). Intersected in-between the sections are retellings of the main events from the OVA. As this information is repeated later on I don't see that these pages were really worth it.

The black and white section fills up the second half of the book, as normal. I guess they must have decided that as a payoff for a better printed colour section we should suffer a horribly printed black and white section. It's black text on grey paper here, with a kind of sleep inducing effect. The first half of this section is devoted to mobile suit development history for the One Year War. It covers the effectiveness of mobile suits under gravity, the development of anti-MS units, Gundam development, GM development, field customisations, Zaku variations, Gouf variations and amphibious mobile suits. Each section may only get two pages each but there's a fair bit of information in there, pretty much all of which is accurate (if occasionally slightly vague, perhaps to prevent contradicting other sources). I found it a good read and a nice history of initial UC mobile suit development. It finishes of with a one page description of the Minovksy flight system and its implementations in Zeon mobile weapons.

The second half of the black and white section is an amalgamation of other information to flesh out the background to 08th MS team. There's a section on the Federation military system and their adaptation to the changes in war. That's quite interesting though I think there are more in-depth descriptions to be found on the net if you look hard enough. There are then two pages devoted to summarising the events of the OVA, which I see as pretty pointless. The following two pages are much more interesting, covering the territorial conflicts of the One Year War on Earth and in space. The final pages cover Zeon support units and Federation support units. They're both quite interesting to read as well, though the Feds get strangely short changed with only one page (could have got rid of some of those more needless sections and given them another page). It's all finished off with black and white lineart of the support vehicles and characters from 08th MS Team. It's actually quite nice to see all those One Year War support vehicle revamps, though the character section is as pointless as ever.

Opinion

This technical manual is a large step up from the Wing manual, no matter what my revised opinions on the first are. The relevance and interest of the information is much higher. I was somewhat disappointed that there was no proper technical information, such as some discussion or description of beam weaponry or other Minovsky physics but the information that is there instead is still very good. As I already mentioned it's pretty accurate, I only spotted a couple of minor errors and the rest ties in with what I know of other Japanese sourcebooks. The colour section is still pretty useless (that's what you get for having quality online mecha sites) but at least the extra lineart is of interest. As I have already mentioned, there's some redundant information they've insisted in including but that's present in all five of the technical manuals, sadly. Overall the book is a good buy, assuming the contents of the black and white section interests you. As a handy reference for mobile suits (rather than loading a website) it's also quite good, but the real strength lies in the text sections. If that's your cup of tea (as it is mine) then it's a recommended purchase.

Written to Dust Brothers - Hessel, Raymond K