Before we start talking about the Gerbera Tetra itself, we need to go over a little bit of history, to explain how it is it came into existence in the first place.
The Rise of Anaheim Electronics
Prior to the One Year War, Anaheim Electronics was a massive corporate conglomerate that made all sorts of products. One thing they did not make, however, was mobile suits.
That soon changed postwar. Seeing the rise of mobile suits as a business opportunity, the company scooped both the Zeonic Company and the Zimmad Company. These, of course, were the two main producers of mobile suits for now-defeated Principality of Zeon.
This left Anaheim with some of the best mobile suit engineers in the Earthsphere, along with all their technology, staff, and intellectual property. And with only one real client left to sell to, they naturally began to work on new mobile suit designs for the Earth Federation. Keep in mind that at this time, the Federation wasn’t quite ready to completely ditch their own in-house R&D efforts, but apparently they were extremely serious about giving Anaheim a shot. That’s because one of the first things they contracted out to the company was the work to create the next generation of Gundam-type suits. Enter Anaheim’s “Gundam Development Project”.
Operation Paperclip
The idea of Anaheim hiring Zeon engineers - and the Federation awarding them work - has echoes of the real world Operation Paperclip. Whether or not this is coincidence I cannot say, but I wouldn’t be too surprised if it wasn't.As part of this project, Anaheim built multiple prototype Gundam units, each one intended to serve a specific combat role.
The GP01 was the closest to the original Gundam, being a multipurpose unit that could be fitted for both ground and space combat.
The GP02 was a much bulkier design with a very specific purpose - to be able to launch nuclear missiles.
Lastly, the GP03 was built primarily as the control unit for the Orchis, a massive weapons platform/mobile armor that was meant to have enough speed - and carry enough firepower - to defend a sector of space all by itself. The GP03 could, however, operate without the Orchis, in which case it was a fairly slender and streamlined Gundam with a bunch of compact, foldable armaments (presumably to save space when it was in the Orchis).
And then there was the GP04 (AKA the “Gerbera”).
According to the Gundam Wiki, the idea for this unit was to create the Gundam equivalent of the Kampfer - a high speed mobile suit that could move in quickly and take out a bunch of enemy units before they could sufficiently react (and then, hopefully, get out). It was originally intended to look like this:
However, Anaheim eventually decided that it was too similar to the GP01 (or rather, that the GP01 was deemed “good enough” to do the same kind of job), at which point the GP04 was scrapped.
Except, by the time they scrapped it, the unit was already mostly completed. And rather than have it sit around doing nothing, certain elements within Anaheim tried to make it into a yet another, shadier business opportunity. It should be no surprise to learn that a lot of those ex-Zeon engineers working in Anaheim still had sympathies for the Zeon remnant forces, so they approached the Delaz Fleet and offered them up the GP04 (which they happily accepted).
Selling Arms
The idea of Anaheim selling weapons to both sides of a conflict has a lot of parallels to real life arms dealers, and is another way in which Anaheim’s early history as a weapons manufacturer feels true to life.However, in a move that feels extremely on brand for a bunch of literal cartoon villains, the engineers insisted that if it was going to be used by Zeon, it should look Zeonic. So they took the mobile suit, refit it with a new set of external armor, and renamed it the “Gerbera Tetra”, which preserves both its original name (“Gerbera”) and it’s original numbering (“tetra”):
Why was Anaheim “allowed” to give the Gerbera Tetra to Zeon?
It’s a reasonable question, and while I'm not sure if there is an official explanation, there are at least two theories.The first theory is that the Feddies were simply unaware of its existence. This is fairly plausible if you accept the idea that Federation brass weren’t privy to every last detail of the company’s R&D efforts. When you consider that Anaheim did most (if not all) of their development work on the moon - and when you further consider that, in real life, Stardust Memory was written long before Internet-driven mass surveillance was a thing - I think it becomes very easy to accept that a government situated on Earth might not be able to keep tabs on what's going on on the Moon, even if they wanted to.
The second theory is that the Federation did know about the Gerbera, and let it be given to the Zeon. One of the major plot points of Stardust Memory is that there was a conspiracy within the Federation to allow the Zeon Remnants to commit a major attack, to use it as justification for creating the Titans and thus introduce fascism into the Federation by force. If you're one of the conspirators, you might want to give the Zeon forces anything that might give them an advantage.
A corollary to this theory is that they may have allowed it to be sold off because they knew the mobile suit would be given to a pilot who was secretly working for the Feddies.
Conclusion
So that’s how the Gerbera Tetra came to be. It’s one relatively minor footnote in Gundam’s fictional history, but I find it interesting in part because of how many parallels it has with real world arms development (which is not to say that it is completely true to life. Just that it has echoes).
In my second intro post, I’ll go into the technology behind the suit, and the weirdly lopsided regard that the fandom has for it.