Can a Gundam setting move beyond the solar system without going too much into fantasy/super robot territory?
What do you mean? Solar System Gundams are already super robots with fantasy space ghosts and shiiieeeettz
>>24035075/thread
>>24035070Just keep the fantasy elements to a long-dead alien civilization whose technological achivements were discovered and reverse-engineered to explain why mankind was able to colonize planets beyond Earth.
>>24035169I implore you to never get involved in sci fi worldbuilding.
>>24035075No cause the space magic isn't weaponized enough or all encompasing like some 40k shit
>>24035070I mean Gundam touches on this already a bit.The big thing would be adherence to the speed of light as a hard limit. You know how IBO had the travel between Mars and Earth be a big part of it, well there isn't such casual travel or communication between star systems (unless maybe your newtype equivalent can a bit as a super special thing as a treat), you could have your AGE style multigenerational story set in transit without seeing the beginning or end of the journey. So yeah I could totally see a reasonably grounded Gundam story in that sort of setting, although I tend to think of Gundam more as being plausible scifi elements framing more fantastical aspects.
>>24035070Unfortunately the speed of light is not only a hard-limit, it's also slow as fuck. Any sci-fi story grounded in science and physics needs to either be contained to the solar system, or to hand-wave some incredible technology that can at least sound mathematically plausible, but which in reality would be impossible to engineer, like a faster-than-light Alcubierre drive.I don't think one of those would make the series fall into fantasy or super-robot stuff. It would remain a "grounded" sci-fi show, just with some artistic liberties when it comes to physics so that you can actually have conflict happening between two star systems without being bogged down by 300 year round-trips for logistics.
>>24035169That’s just Macross.
>>24035070That's literally the big plot twist of Turn A. The Turn X was made by Newtypes that had fled the solar system during the Dark History, and their weapons of war still managed to find their way back to Earth and cause an apocalypse.
>>24035070Gundam setting can move anywhere in any possible fashion, that's the whole point of AUs. Will it though? We just don't know
>>24035455The entire theme of Gundam has always been man's inability to get it together and stop trying to kill each other. The struggle of man against man, not man against alien. And any peace that is achieved is only a temporary lull in the thousands of years of warfare.
>>24035473You can use the latter to present the former. Frontier looks like it's about fighting the Vajra but the actual conflict is entirely between people. Not that I think this is the right way for Gundam to go, but there's ways for it to stay focused on those themes even with more exotic elements.
>>24035445I thought the X was a grunt level MS that drifted into Sol and look like it had its ass handed to it by some “other”?
>>24035342Not if the only remnant of the dead alien civilization is just a few characters with their DNA and that in the end, it'll just be kept to humans vs. humans simply replaying the same conflicts, but with the alien technology. In addition, have it that mobile suits, for this hypothetical Gundam story, are only possible by reverse-engineering alien technology as it's proof that's mankind will see nothing more than an opportunity to invent new weapons to resume the same conflicts.
