The Rick Dom was a
space-adapted version of the Zimmad Company's revolutionary land
combat mobile suit Dom. It was near the end of the One Year War
of UC 0079, and the Zeon Duchy, realizing that the outcome of
the war was going to be decided in space, devoted all of its mobile
suit manufacturing resources to space combat units. Refining the
Dom design for space was simple, and mostly involved replacing
the hover jet thrusters with standard rocket thrusters.
Development of the
Rick Dom proceeded swiftly. Since the design was so little altered
from the already-proven Dom, Zimmad appears to have skipped the
prototype stage entirely, using the MS-06RD4 test machine for
the necessary data-gathering. The Zaku II at last went out of
production entirely, as all available production lines were devoted
to cranking out hundreds of Rick Doms for Zeon's space forces.
