Compton

Unit type: land battleship
Manufacturer: ZAFT (Earth Liberation Army Zeldovich base)
Dimensions: length 320 meters
Armament: 2 x 3-barrel 420mm cannon, 1 port, 1 starboard; 2 x 2-barrel beam cannon, 1 port, 1 starboard; 4 x 4-barrel 75mm machine gun, 2 port, 2 starboard; 32-cell vertical launch system, can arm surface-to-surface or antiaircraft missiles; 24 x heavy missile launcher; 8 x 40mm vulcan gun, 2 port/aft, 2 starboard/aft, 2 port/midships, 2 starboard/midships; 20 x flare launcher/smoke discharger, 8 fore, 6 midships, 6 aft
Powerplant: 2 x fast neutron nuclear reactor, output rated at 64700 kW
Propulsion: 4 x caterpillar tread on articulated bogie
Hangar capacity: 26 mobile suits

Tasked with freeing the people of Earth from its tyrannical governments and furthering a pro-Coordinator agenda, ZAFT's Earth Liberation Army began its drop operations without any specialized military hardware for use in a terrestrial environment. After PLANT began developing a number of unique mobile suits for the task, ZAFT's planetside forces also devised a series of warships and support craft, among other vehicles, for combat in gravity conditions.

Developed towards the end of ZAFT's war on Earth, the Compton is the heaviest and most well-armed warship deployed for use in a terrestrial environment by the Earth Liberation Army. Because of the great bulk and mass of the battleship, ZAFT's revolutionary scale system cannot propel the warship, so it was outfitted with a set of fairly standard caterpillar treads. While its speed is greatly reduced compared to the earlier scale-equipped Lesseps and Petrie, as well as losing amphibious and lateral movement capability, the Compton is however able to cross any sort of terrain with relatively equivalent mobility, rather than just those with relatively loose soil. The majority of the Compton's forward hull is given over to a cavernous, multi-decked mobile suit hangar, with entry provided by a large hatch in the front allowing two units to disembark at once. The hangar is intended for deployment of standard mobile suits, and does not suffer a reduction in capacity for using them unlike the BuCUE-oriented hangars of the Lesseps.

The Compton is very heavily armed, including a number of weapon systems that would later be used on the advanced Minerva all-environment battleship. Two triple-barreled artillery cannons are placed on either side of the ship's main superstructure, with a pair of beam cannons positioned further ahead to supplement them. As with typical ZAFT designs, the battleship is also bristling with missile launchers, with four vertical launch systems placed around the main hull and the horn-like platforms on the aft end of the vessel. Additional long-range rockets nearly as tall as a mobile suit are stored in the horns as well, as are a number of antiaircraft vulcan guns. For close defense against mobile suits, a quartet of heavy machine guns are installed on either of the forward bogies, and the Compton maintains a large number of mortars to dispense flares, chaff, and other countermeasures.

Excepting the Atlantic Federation's mobile fortress Bandaal, the Compton was likely the heaviest land battleship deployed during the war, both in terms of combat capability as well as simple mass. This presented some unique challenges to ZAFT, as the battleships - built at the Australian Zel'dovich base - would have to be disassembled to be shipped across the Indian Ocean for use in Africa. Most of these powerful land battleships were destroyed during the final months of ZAFT's Earth operations by Guild-aligned forces, but at least a handful survived the end of the war to re-appear in the hands of renegade groups and other "second-hand" operators, acting as mobile bases of operation to stage acts of piracy and other criminal activites from.