Technology & Combat Characteristics
This vessel is an unarmed transport capable of both space and atmospheric flight. It is of a blocky yet streamlined design, allowing for seamless reentry in a planet's atmosphere, as well as providing a simplistic and cheap design for mass production. For the purpose of reentry, its bow is fitted with four massive reverse thruster nozzles for deceleration, and it can deploy an inflatable heat shield from its front section. After entering the atmosphere, it can deploy the carried mobile suits from two hatches on its bottom. The vessel also has moderate maneuverability in the air thanks to the wings and fins on its port and starboard sides, as well as the fins near its aft. It is unknown if it is capable of indefinite atmospheric flight – it may be possible that the transport can simply deploy its mobile suits and reenter space. It is able to carry up to 10 OZ-02MD Virgo or WF-02MD Virgo II mobile suits in a single row of 10 split into 2 sets of hatches each accommodating 5 mobile suits.
The ship does have a crew, mainly the transport's pilots in a cockpit on the dorsal bow, on top of its reverse thruster nozzles, as well as accommodations for the pilots of its embarked mobile suits. The transports in Endless Waltz appear to be drastically upsized variants, large enough for MMS-01 Serpents to be transported in two rows of 8 inside, split into 2 sets of hatches accommodating 8 mobile suits each.
History
The transport was used in A.C. 195 by OZ to carry their new frontline mobile suit, the OZ-02MD Virgo, across the Earth as part of "Operation Nova", a campaign to destroy any resistance to its global unification efforts, though many would be destroyed by Zechs Merquise in the OZ-00MS Tallgeese.
After OZ's Lunar Base was taken by the White Fang, they would continue to use the transport to carry Virgos and their new WF-02MD Virgo II Mobile Dolls into battle against OZ's remaining space forces. Many of these vessels would be used during White Fang's attack on the Space Fortress Bulge, with most of them being destroyed when the fortress fired its main beam cannon, vaporizing them and several suits.
On December 24, A.C. 196, numerous larger variants of these transports were used by the Mariemaia Army to deploy the MMS-01 Serpent mobile suits from the resource satellite MO-III to Brussels, the capital of the Earth Sphere Unified Nation. Zechs Merquise, now a member of Preventer, attempted to intercept them in the OZ-00MS2B Tallgeese III. However, he was only able to destroy three of them before he was stopped by Dekim Barton, who threatened to drop colony X-18999 onto Earth if he continued to attack. The rest of the fleet was able to deploy their mobile suits on Earth as a result, though it's unknown what happened to these transports afterwards.