MBF-M1 M1 Astray

The MBF-M1 M1 Astray was the Orb Union’s way of having the power necessary to keep their independence from the Earth Alliance and ZAFT, as well as their neutrality in the Bloody Valentine War. The M1 Astray was based on the prototype Gundam Astray units developed at the space colony Heliopolis, which in turn were based on stolen data from the Earth Alliance’s initial five prototype Gundams. Whereas the Astray prototypes were later customized by their individual pilots, the M1 Astrays were simple mass production suits armed only with vulcan guns, a beam rifle and beam sabers. During the development of the M1 Astray at Orb’s Morgenroete facility, lead researcher Erica Simmons was unable to create an operating system that would allow Naturals to pilot a mobile suit as well as Coordinators. However, with the arrival of the Alliance battleship Archangel, Kira Yamato created a custom OS for the M1 Astray based on his modifications to the OS in the GAT-X105 Strike Gundam.

With this new OS, Natural pilots were able to fight on a level comparable to Coordinators. The M1 Astrays were first deployed during the Alliance’s invasion of Orb, and the surviving units were transferred to space on the battleship Kusanagi. While the M1 Astrays performed well against ZAFT’s aging ZGMF-1017 GINN and the Alliance’s GAT-01 Strike Dagger, they fared worse against ZAFT’s latest mass production model, the ZGMF-600 GuAIZ. In addition to the M1, Orb produced a space-use variant, the MBF-M1A M1A Astray, along with the Earth-use hover variant MBF-M1+EF-24R M1 Astray Shrike.