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The team did heavily damage it in the Missile Base, but it could be argued that all that damage was largely cosmetic. Several of the outer reactors and weapons were made inoperable, true, but the core of the unit survived, and was capable of continuing combat after a little bit of minor downtime, despite being hit by both the team and the base's self destruct.
Has anyone here ever looked at tanks? Tanks are designed with incredibly thick front and bottom armour, this is so 1) they survive being shot at and 2) they survive tripping any undiscovered landmines. Now sure sometimes a landmine destroys a tank, anti-tank landmines can if they catch the sweet spot do this. Mostly however Anti-tank mines are designed to "immobilize" tanks by blowing a track off, no tracks = no movement, no movement = no threat, why waste time destroying something not threatening when the crew will need to abandon it if the battle goes bad, allowing your own engineers to repair, re-paint and re-crew a fully operational tank for you probably replacing the ones you lost in the costly tank battle?
The ironclad is essentially a tank, so it is safe to assume it has good armour, Selphie's team (if you bothered using junctions on them) could summon very capable GF's not to mention that no one here has complained that the Ironclad is the second tank they destroyed and harmed with melee attacks remember the spider tank (I forget the proper designation sorry) thunder spells and lightning elem-atk junction ftw there. The first tank kept repairing and in the end was finished by a catastrophic assault by Quistis with an anti-tank machine gun. Based on the experience of the Dollet mission it is also safe to assume the ironclad too had "self-repair" programs allowing it to function even with some pretty heavy damage but going by the crew's abandoning the machine they're not so advanced as the spider tank's. So how does Selphie and team escape detection? Well c'mon guys how'd they get in? They just stole uniforms probably from some poor G-soldiers they kicked the crap out of and left tied up in the desert or perhaps, they managed to find another bunch of uniforms or more believable yet though they even kept their previous disguises "just in case" because after all they were in an enemy country let alone missile base disguises like that could be useful when the government wants you dead or locked up. So they pose as G-soldiers probably letting one of the guys on the mission assume "the command" role for the ironclad since Selphie obviously doesn't have a manly voice.
How does the Iron-clad survive? Well firstly they quite probably just blew their way past the bulkhead doors of the missile base allowing them to escape the big blast but to be caught inside the blast radius so perhaps a lot of insignificant damage. I didn't notice the ironclad (same can be said for the masses of other enemy veichles you see fleeing the base before the ironclad battle) in the FMV nor did I notice a distinct lack of the ironclad I'm sorry but heck it was pretty much "ooh pretty fmv lets see *boom* HOLY COW!" so lets roll with my idea they blow the doors wide open and drive the ironclad out.
The ironclad is found by a G-army column and picked up obviously there was some deception involved here so that the G-army believes the 3 of them to be actual soldiers this could be anything from "sorry sir my documents got destroyed heres my name and rank look me up" to carefully falsified information bear in mind we're dealing with SeeD fully trained SeeD who are taught the intricacies of espionage, combat and infiltration it's a safe bet to assume they can cook something up here. So anyway the column picks the ironclad up, under pretense of repairing it's armour ect the missile base team stay inside the tank for atleast 99% of the time heck whats safer, giving the people outside the chance to put two and two together or being "buried under a mountain of work" fixing the tank.
Eventually our Ironclad and missing team wind up in FH where they meet up with Squall and his squad. Trying to get his attention they actually end up in combat with him and so he kicks their asses for being dumb and not realizing how to operate the ironclad properly they climb out, dump their uniforms and violla you have the safe arrival of the ironclad and the missile base team.
Yeah, I finished the game, I meant like before FH xDQuote:
Originally Posted by evanak4
Maybe they junctioned fire magic to elemental defense lulz.
Maybe it's a game with many inconsistancies in it and we shouldn't worry about it?
Well AK theres a lot of inconsistencies in many games this however is just like something Square would use in an FF game to re-unite your team once they've forced the split of them for nearly an entire disc of storyline. Mis-directing the player so they might believe they've just "killed" half the characters (though the fact you could still "switch" junctions with those characters and even place Rinoa an obviously key storyline character by this point in the party for the base mission kinda means not many serious players will believe the characters dead, just missing though after Aeiris in FF7 who knows?) whilst never fully explaining their survival to the player. In a way it'd been nice to have an FMV of Selphie's squad escaping the missile base and even perhaps documenting the journey they had at this point in the game not even a flashy full fmv would have to be used quite easily it could take place using the game engine so that text can easily be displayed over it to tell the story. However the fmv wasn't included I suppose I'd be interested in knowing if it was ever "on the cards" for Square to do so but dropped due to restrictions. We know they were very apprehensive about the length of FFVIII 4 discs was something new and untried and they were just unsure if it'd sell if it went to 5 so perhaps this is one of the many small things they dropped in regards to getting their story on to 4 discs.
I always thought that Selphie's team drove the BGH251F2 to Fisherman's Horizon. Obviously, they didn't know the other team was at Fisherman's Horizon at the time, but I'm guessing they thought they could get to Balamb if they crossed the bridge.
Anyway, the other party, upon seeing it, decided it was an enemy and attacked, thus making it not a good time for Selphie's party to reveal themselves.
As for the tank attacking, it was malfunctioning. It had previously blown four gaskets, and taken a lot of damage. So, much like the T-1000 at the end of Terminator 2, it was malfunctioning, and thus attacking without being told to. For all we know, it had been attacking all the way from the missile base.
This must be it.Quote:
Originally Posted by nik0tine
It's stated in the game they're picked up from the Gabaldian continent by a G-Army force bound for FH soon after the events of the Missile base. Also they'd know the geography of the world and would figure that since Balamb is an island their best bet would be to flee to Timber in the BGH251F2 dump it somewhere near to the city and progress towards Balamb by train or even head for Dollet and try to commandeer a vessel to sail to Balamb. The G-army I think didn't expect Balamb Garden to survive the assault and thus decided with SeeD out of the picture to renew aggression over the ocean with Esthar since any such force would require a line of supply the rail bridge between Gabaldia and Esthar would be essential to them FH standing on the middle of the bridge would be a good place to occupy as a forward operation whilst the bridge is prepared to ship the G-Army across to Esthar. We know Ultimecia in control of Edea wanted to reach Adel (well by the end of disc 3 we do for sure, by end of disc 2 we know Edea is not acting alone and that Rinoa is out of it) Taking the G-army to war with Esthar would give her an opportunity to get to Adel and thus makes sense. The BGH251F2 was probably going to be used to support the FH push and then once FH was under control it's talented engineers forced to repair the tank properly.Quote:
Originally Posted by The Ceej