Mobile Suit Gundam AT

[Ford Prefect]

I'm sorry. This might be a little rambling.

Akright. For those of you who don't know what Gundam is, I'll give a brief explanation. Mobile Suit Gundam is a giant robot anime series that first aired in 1979 and invented a genre in the process. Prior to this, giant robots were the Japanese equivalent of superheroes; they were colourful, loud and impressive. Gundam instead treated its giant robots (which weren't as giant anymore) as little more than machines. They were mass-produced weapons of war and that was that. Though MSG still had Super Robot influences in a number of transformable mecha, it still mostly adhered to the concept of the machines just being machines. The series eventually became so popular that it spawned not only sequels and spin-offs, but entire new universes to set Gundam themed stories in. The Universal Century is the most popular (and has the most media), but notable new timelines include After Colony, in which was set Mobile Suit Gundam Wing (basically the first series to garner popularity int he west) and Future Century, which featured the blatantly and awesomely Super Robot series Mobile Fighter G Gundam. There are a bunch more.

Because I have been watching the most recent series, Gundam 00, I got it into my head to see what I would do with a timeline based upon the basic premises of the series. They are fairly vague, but they more or less boil down to 'in the future, in space, with giant robots'. You can more or less tell when something is a Gundam series and when it isn't, but you'll just have to trust me on this. Deciding I needed some help to flesh out my ideas, I drafted Invictus to the After Tranquility Commitee, and we have spent some time chatting about this. Much of this is either his idea or derived from his ideas, so major props to him.

'After Tranquility' is the calender of the setting, and is identical to the one which Zor uses for Stellar Dominions. That is to say, it sets its year zero as being 1969, based upon the moon landings. From here, things diverge. Beaten to the moon, the United Soviet Federation turns its plans towards Mars as a symbol of the socialist future. In the spirit of Clarke and 2OOI, space is not a place of war - in space capitalists and communists are ideallistically friendly. I don't really care if this is particularly realistic, but in space, the Cold War is relatively meaningless. Fast forward to AT 1189, and we see the fruits of their labours. Though not especially plausible, both Mars and Venus are terraformed and extensively colonised. The Earth has fallen into a barely-stable morass lorded over by the orbitarians in their lagrange clusters of habitats. In the outer system, Helium rich energy barons gleefully watch as they ascend the guilded towers of political dominance. But before I ramble on too much at this point, that is the setting. Humans live on or around Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, to varying degrees. For example, while billions of people live on Venus, only millionso f people live near Neptune. Most power is centered int he hands of the Big Four, being the Venusian, Martian, Jovian and Saturnian treaty organisations.

Though there is a lot of world-building, this is still focussed around a central sotry, and features a main protagonist. Usually the protagonist of a Gundam story is a young man who, through accident or adversity, comes to pilot a Gundam (which is usually a particularly powerful model of mobile suit). The protagonist of AT, Freeman Ayato, does not. In an attempt to be fairly unconventional, I have decided that the main character is not a pilot, and shall never touch the controls of a giant mecha. Instead, Ayato is a parallel economist and wide boy, which basically means that he will buy, sell, transport and trade in pretty much anything illegally. Weapons, drugs, human organs, data ... almost anything that can be transported illegally can and will be transported by Ayato and his lolilicious assistant from the moon, Piety Carneli. They live on an O'neill Cylinder in the Martian glitter band called Sepharial (props to Arty) and make a comfortable living and splurge mercilessly on trivialities.

Their story more or less begins about twelve hours after having completed an important job for a gangster known as Dmitri. Dmitri is a fairly important member of the largest criminal family on Sepharial, and he has had Ayato ship in two thousand tons of top grade cocaine from Venus at a highly competitive price. Dmitri is so pleased that he give Ayato a bonus in the form a kilogram of coke and sends him on his way with the promise of more jobs. Ayato goes home to ponder how best to sell a key of blow (for maximum profit) and Piety suggests they get righteously smashed in celebration. So they do, and as always in fiction, drug-use results in immediate and awful reprecussions. You can't get away with nothing.

The next day, Freeman Ayato wakes up with a righteous headache. His assistant is sleeping in her underwear on the expensive might-just-be-real-leather couch and there is not nearly enough white powder left on the desk. He gets a phonecall from Dmitri saying to come meet him somewhere, and despite feeling like death, Ayato's puts on his sunglasses and goes in search of a Prarie Oyster/money. This is not a good idea; he doesn't pay enough attention to Dmitri and agrees to transport some corpses with minor damage for organ extraction (there's a minor conflict going on somewhere on the surface, details, schmetails). Ayato goes home, has breakfast, then starts putting connections together. He contracts a mercenary group in the area to pick up the bodies and transport them to Sepharial.

Only, when they arrive, Ayato discovers they are not corpses, but living people, albeit in boxes. Ayato will transport a lot of stuff, but he draws the line as trafficking in human beings, if only to make him feel like less than a total bastard. He gets quite angry, and dumps the lot with some charity, shafting both Dmitri and the mercenaries. As you can imagine, hilarity ensues.

That will have to do for the moment. I may well write more tomorrow.

[Malchus]

Well, from what you've told of this setting over MSN, I'm very much looking forward to this.

[Mobius 1]

"Parallel economist", heh. Anyway, I can't wait to hear more about the Merc team.

[Nekomata]

Awesome, I used to love gundam before destiny... Mayne you can bring back my passion for it.

[Ford Prefect]

We'll see how I do then, eh?

Previously, I left off with an introduction to the happening. Freeman Ayato, black market economist, has made two seperate groups unhappy. The first is obviously the Sepharial mafia, represented by Dmitri. They were banking on the quiet shipping of a whole bunch of fresh bodies in an attempt to stock up the sex trade. The other group are the mercenaries that Ayato contracted to do the transport. Neither is particularly clever on his part, but it is especially dangerous with the Invictus Military Company. Our introduction to them is shutting down that conflict mentioned on the surface in the last post. The IMC is an elite, roving group of soldiers, mostly known for its Mobile Suit squadrons, including the ace aces of Saint Squadron. Coming from a wide and varied set of backgrounds which haven't exactly been put together yet, they travel about the system wherever the solar wind (laser arrays) take them, get hired by people, then blow shit up.

After spectacularly ruining the shit of whomever dared stain Mars with conflict, the IMC happily transports what they also think is a bunch of dead people, because there's some francs to be had. However, Ayato refuses to pay them for a job well done, leaving them ever so slightly out of pocket. In the spirit of Schlock Mercenary, they are not pleased and they are also heavily armed. However, The Captain (no other name, by decision) is a reasonable man and does not intend to pursue it with violence. However, one of the Saints, Nephytys Kafka, is not a reasonable woman, and thus pursues the matter with her trademark baseball bat.

At roughly the same time, Dmitri and his associates, one of whom is a gorilla in a suit and with a pointedly obvious set of brass knuckles, are paying Ayato a visit. Ayato demands that Piety to run like the dickens, get on their rocketship and then fly like the dickens to Venus, while he distracts the gangsters by screaming and bleeding on the street. He goes out and has a heated argument about morality with Dmitri, who demands that Ayato be wasted. Kafka, who is mildly touched by the sentiments expressed in Ayato's speech, steps in. A fight ensues, yes, between a chick with a baseball bat and a gorilla in a suit. Kafka wins and demands payment for services rendered, on top of those already accured by the IMC. Ayato refuses ont he basis that killing a bunch of mafia hitmen have not actually improved the situation.

Eventually, Ayato and Piety are actually inducted into the crew, partly to get them out of the reach of the mafia, and partly so that Ayato can work off his 'debt'. Given his propensity for wheeling and dealing, he is eventually hired as the Invictus' 'logisitics officer' to help them make more money as they go about their business across the solar system.

[Ford Prefect]

Gundam is generally a series which is fairly paradoxial. All of them, without fail, are anti-war, yet generally about a war of some kind. Exactly how they present their message varies. It can be genre defining, as with the original Mobile Suit Gundam. It can be rather cunning, as with the most recent Gundam 00. Or it can be irritating and trite, as it was in Gundam SEED Destiny. I haven't decided exactly how I will present AT's anti-war message, but on no-account shall Shinn Asuka shout 'do you people want to start another war!?' in the first episode.

Neither shall it focus on a war in the conventional sense. Most wars in Gundam are quite large, such as the One Year War or the Bloody Valentine Wars. Even stuff like Gundam Wing and Gundam 00, which only really featured one major nation, was still more or less a battle for the fate of the world and its future. I have chosen to move away from that. As hinted in the previous post, Gundam AT focusses on the Invictus Military Company as it travels around the solar system, doing deeds that usually result in Ayato posing audaciously and giant robots punching other robots. It's a good formula.


Art courtesy of Artemis

The IMC, which is named after their cruiser, the Invictus, which is named after and based upon the Future Perfect flagship Sol Invictus, all of which is basically a roundabout homage to the user Invictus ... sorry, I lost control of that sentence. Basically, the IMC commands a modified cruiser called the Invictus. They can, should the situation call for it, launch fourteen mobile suits; most notably, the four remaining MS units of the elite among the elite Saint Squadron. After a fashion, all the MS pilots in the IMC are good, but only the Saints are true aces (ace of aces, in fact). You become an ace by making five confirmed kills over the course of your career. You can only become an ace of aces if you pull a Char and kill five battleships in a single battle, or close enough. As a result, Saint Squadron are the Shitennou of the series; that group of four right below the boss dudes who kick all sorts of ass. They were originally five, except that Saint 1, Beowulf Fudo, is killed a few months before the beginning of the story.

They are, in order: Montauk Ares, Israel Samsa, Nephytys Kafka and Bear Fury. Most important of these, after a fashion, is Kafka, who pilots the CRX-88 Hyperion. The unit is highly tuned, like all the Saint suits, and she has nicknamed it Gundam, as she is a fan of the television series. I don't see much wrong with some lighthearted self-referential nonsense. Though the Hyperion Gundam is a highly tuned machine on the cutting edge of development, it is not significantly beyond the capabilities of any other MS. It is comparable to the elite units of the most advanced governments, and customised to her exacting specifications (like all the Saints). As a rule, it dual wields whatever hand cannons it likes and has a bitchin' cloak, probably.

Basically any mobile suit that matters uses a fusion drive to zip around like the dickens. And I mean zip around; IMC's catchphrase is based heavily upon the game Armored Core. The latter installments of this game, the premise is that you are not supposed to walk, but rather skate with assistance of boosters. Though some manner of pin-point barrier exists, the fact remains that it is just better to never be hit, or otherwise to hit your opponent first. High speed units with excruciatingly high agility also results in the frankly inevitable Itano Circus, as I seemingly can't do anything with missiles which does not feature at least one crazy dance through a missile swarm. Obviously speed does not necessarily mean light: though it takes more energy to shift them around, heavy duty MS are more capable of sustaining higher gee-forces (though this is fairly irrelevant, I think, as the gee-tolerances of any pilot are probably much lower). I'm a firm believer in the style of heavy-duty mobile suits like the Gouf and Dom raping face, and as such, heavy duty suits such as the Gouf and Dom shall in fact rape face. Montauk Ares pilots an ace custom (The Heim Ruiner) which is derived from a mecha based upon the huge, angry, red Sazabi. This suit had the unusual quality of being enormous and bulky (it was around twenty three meters tall, and most MS are about 18 or so) and yet very fast and agile. It also raped face, generally.

More important, I think, is the treatment of pilots. In my mind, mobile suit combat can end up with the suits flipping out like ninjas on rocket skates in space with guns. While ranges in space are likely to be huge, it isn't hard to artificially reduce them, at which point the party gets crazy. If the Gundam pulls a sudden set of ten or twenty gee turns, what happens to the pilot? How can she possibly keep track of dozens of opponents and hundreds of missiles, weapons fire trajectories and what have you? Most cockpits are filled with a kind of gel which helps counteract severe accelerations, and the pilots themselves are in someway unnaturally tough (Kafka fights a gorilla and wins, for example). Think of it like muddled darwinism with more giant robots; a pilot will develop heightened reflexes and spatial awareness, and when juiced up on combat stimulants can suddenly do the tango at mach three. I'm not entirely sure at thel evel of tinkering that goes on with a pilot, however. They do universally have a series of implants that allow them to interface to an extent with the MS, furthering their control and precision. It's not quite the 'become the machine' stuff which appeared in my After, In the Dark universe, but it's moderately close.

[Magister Militum]

Ah, you decided to go ahead with the concept after all. This is already looking promising, and I'll definately keep my eye on this.

[Ford Prefect]

I think I will continue this thread with the first step in a grand tour of the solar system. One by one, I will raid Wikipedia and deliver pertinent information regarding each planet regarding composition, history and what governments live there. As I will do this in order, I will begin with ...

Mercury

The smallest and innermost planet in the solar system, Mercury is also the least developed. It is the only terrestrial planet which has had no environmental engineering attempted and it is home to less than a thousand people at any point in its short, eighty eight day long year. Mercury has been noted by astronomers as back as the 14th century BC, and over the course of thousands of years has been further investigated by Galileo, Kepler, Gassendi and Zupi. Despite the technical challenges involved, humans have sent several probes to Mercury, starting with Mariner 10 in AT10 and MESSENGER in AT44. The first time a human walked on the surface of Mercury was when representatives of the Venus Charter Council touched down in AT794. Since then, it was been home primarily to automated construction equipment, blanketing it in solar collectors and honeycombing it with particle accelerators. Now mediated by the VCC, a variety of venusian interests use Mercury to perform high energy physics experiments as well as to produce the only significant amounts of antimatter in the system. Rightfully, Mercury is called the Antimatter Capital of the Solar System.

Mercury is one of the terrestrial planets, and like the Earth is a rocky body. It is the smallest planet in the system; at 2439.7km in radius, it is smaller than the moons Titan and Ganymede. Despite this, Mercury is almost as dense as the Earth, making it particularly massive for its size. Its core is large and rich in iron, more so than any other major body in the solar system. Many theories abound regarding the reasons behind Mercury's curious structure, including it being struck by a planetesimal, roasted by the forming sun, or even having lighter elements of it vacuumed away by a stellar nebula. Though not extensively mined for resources, Mercury's high iron content has proven to be very useful when it comes to construction on the surface. Additionally, the ice present on Mercury has proven to be helpful; what water needs to be consumed by staff or experiments can be obtained from the planet itself, at least currently. However, what life Mercury supports lives within the crust, in full sealed shelters. The surface temperature on the dark side of Mercury, averages 110 K.

Because Mercury essentially lacks any sort of atmosphere due to its small size, its temperatures can vary wildly. The intensity of the sunlight on the surface can reach as much as ten times the solar constant, and temperatures range between 100 and 700 K, for a mean surface temperature of 442.5 K. This, combined with the difficulties of reaching Mercury due to travel into the Sun's potential well and the eccentricity of its orbit, has made actual colonisation of Mercury a non-factor. It is only the convenience of its resources that make it at all palpable for use.

As mentioned, usage of Mercury is overseen by the VCC. No one venusian nation can claim to own it, and technically speaking there is no territory on Mercury. Numerous shouting matches have erupted in the past over the status of ownership on Mercury, and it was the Convocracy who suggested that no one be able to own Mercury. Similar to the martian methods of dealing with disputes over the asteroid belt, members of the VCC would be able to profit from Mercury, but only within the bounds set by treaty. VCC peacekeepers zealously guard the planet as a result. Mercury is potentially quite volatile in a variety of ways, and almost entirely because of antimatter. Antimatter is still the rarest and most expensive commodity in existence. Energy is abundant at Mercury and it is cheaper to produce antimatter there than anywhere else, though it is still far from cheap. It has uses in both interstellar travel and military matters, and it is thought that it could potentially unbalance the fusion economy in the distant future. Others consider it nothing more than a dangerous curiosity, and are instead more interested in the Convocracy's CESR (meaning Council for Experimental Science and Research, and pronounced 'Cesar', generally) and its experiments at the extensive and cutting edge Helios Complex, the largest on the planet. Mercury is also one of the 'railheads' for the Beam Lines, and is the most famous of the many venusian installations that provides to the interplaetary transportation network.

As a world, Mercury is seemingly insignificant. Yet at the same time, it is considered by some to be as much as a future as the helium of any gas giant. Conventional wisdom says that the dominance of the Inner System has passed, and that the Outer System shall become an unassailable power bloc; perhaps the solar panel encrusted Mercury and its subterranean facilities will mitigate, or outright stop this. Only time will tell.


PS. I had a cool picture of Mercury taken by MESSENGER, except it's too large for me to upload.

[Destructionator]

Using Mercury as some kind of energy capital is something that seems common, but doesn't actually make any realistic sense at all. It would be cheaper and easier to just use orbital collectors closer to home to do the same task.

[Ford Prefect]

Which is exactly why I didn't mention it as being the energy capital of the solar system; all solar energy collected on Mercury is used on Mercury.

[Ford Prefect]

Made a very minor edit regarding Mercury and the Beam Line network.

[Shroom Man 777]

This is actually rather interesting.

Now on to the Jovian super-pulsating metastable metallic hydrogen rigs - Heavy Metal Gigers and so ons! With their tentacle veins that reach into the turbulent surface of Jupiter to siphon that liquid steel!

[Ford Prefect]

You'll have to wait while I go through Venus, Earth and Mars first, Shroomy. I'm doing this in order.

[Shroom Man 777]

Then you better have Sir Phobos, Beater of Ass.

The Sacred Law of the Red Planet! MARTIAN LAW!