When the Principality of Zeon launched their invasion of Earth in March of UC0079, the only mass production ground-based mobile suits at their disposal had been the MS-05 Zaku and MS-06J Zaku II, which were nothing more than stripped down space-type suits. Though they remained extremely effective, their overall mobility was greatly hindered by gravity. In order to solve this problem Zeon began development of new mobile suits designed specifically for terrestrial warfare. The MS-07B Gouf would be the first mass produced ground-only mobile suit, but while it was a very powerful close-range unit, it was still forced to plod along on foot just like it's Zaku cousins. Attempts were made to create a flight-capible Gouf (the MS-07H8 Gouf Flight-Type, for instance), but shortly thereafter, the Zeonic Cooperation finished development of the MS-09 Dom. Doms featured powerful thrusters hidden under armored 'skirts' below the backpack and behind the lower legs which allowed them to hover for long distances. This speed and agility allowed by this system would cause the Dom to be the most feared Zeon ground unit of the One Year War. Unfortunately for Zeon, however, the Dom would not appear in time to shift the ground war back in their favor. However, as the war shifted back into space, the Dom line was retooled for space combat and renamed MS-09R Rick Dom.
The Dom has always been one of my favorite designs from Mobile Suit Gundam, so I'm glad to say that the Master Grade does not disappoint. I chose the Dom over the Rick Dom version primarily because I've heard that the Rick Dom kit lacks the weapons of the Dom kit, only having a massive beam bazooka, and because while the Rick Dom was a servicable cannon fodder suit, the Doms were kings of ground warfare. The kit features the same kind of posable fingers as the Rick Dias kit (or rather, the Rick Dias kit features the same fingers as the Dom kit, as the Dom kit is far older), which rocks, even if it's sometimes a little harder to get them to properly grip a weapon. The Dom also probably has the most girth of any of my other kits (with the Rick Dias coming in at a very close second), which limits posing a bit. It's a really nice looking model, unfortunately, I seemed to screw up quite a bit with it. My attempts to properly color the yellow flash bang thing in the torso were rather clusmsy, as were my attempts to color the inside of the mono-eye (it came out much redder than I would have liked, I probably should have stuck with the sticker). The reason I gave it the '01' squad number was because I accidently ruined the both of the '2' ruboffs. I chose '01' because they were right next to each other and figured it'd be harder to screw up that way. Despite my troubles, it came out looking pretty good (this is the major upshot of Master Grades). Sadly, I don't have any 'In Progress' shots due to an unfortunate miscommunication regarding the memory card they were saved on.