My favorite moments of Mobile Suit Gundam realism Part 2

 In my last post on  Gundam tech nerding, I mentioned a few examples of fictional tech from the Gundam universe with real-world analogs. In this post, I'd like to discuss a few more examples.

1. Mobile Suit Gundam 00 - E-Carbon

One bit of technology that does not get discussed as much by casual fans of the show is the E-Carbon material used as armor plating, a building material for the in-universe orbital elevators, and some that, in truth, already exists largely in real life right now.

First, Carbon is one of the most common elements in the Periodic Table of Elements. Second, carbon is an interesting element in that it's not that special in its purest form (not to mention highly unstable), but when used in allotropes, or combinations of carbon with other substances, they can form many interesting and useful things. Two of special note are graphite, used in many industrial processes, and diamonds, which are basically a crystallized form of carbon and valuable in both industry and as jewelry.

The way Carbon is used in Gundam 00, however, is yet another use of carbon. Specifically, E-Carbon is the in-universe equivalent to real-world carbon steel, only it's much more durable. 

Carbon Steel is basically a form of steel forged with a varying degree of atomic carbon to form a stronger steel than would be achieved via other processes. While the resultant material can be very strong, dense, and useful, it tends to have a low melting point.

E-Carbon is particularly favored in the Gundam 00 universe for being strong, rather lightweight vis-à-vis other comparable materials, and remarkably sturdy, resisting hundreds of pounds of kinetic impact. Given that one of the widest uses for this material is for the humanoid weapons known as mobile suits, it's not hard to see how valuable E-Carbon is.

2. Mobile Suit Gundam Wing - Mobile Dolls

In the Gundam Wing universe, it eventually occurred to the bad guys that it would both save them money and avoid the problem of training real soldiers to kill if they instead cut out the middleman.

Enter a man named Tubarov, and what he called "Mobile Dolls".

The Mobile Doll proposal was simple. Instead of putting real people in mobile suits, they would be fitted with an autonomous artificial intelligence that would be preprogrammed to operate their host machine. It would save money on trained personnel and would make war a far cheaper venture for the operators of the Dolls.

That said, the system was far from perfect. Mobile Dolls required an external command module, and while the Dolls were somewhat autonomous, they did not have true intelligence, merely carrying out pre-programmed instructions. Worse, the Doll had a lot of programming holes, and a sufficiently clever opponent could even trick the Dolls into attacking allies. Their inability to innovate also left them woefully unable to fight human foes who had tactics they could not counter.

It's worth noting that a similar, if not nearly as fleshed out, concept exists in the real world. Called "Lethal Autonomous Weapons", or LAW for short.

Aside from the fact that real-world systems are not nearly as robust as the fictional systems mentioned above, many of the limitations mentioned above still apply.

And in both fiction and reality, the idea of autonomous killing machines designed to kill people without human involvement became subjects of fictional outrage in Gundam Wing and are the target of real-world fear and disgust for the dehumanizing effect they have and the ethics of using such weapons.

3. Mobile Suit Gundam - Artificial Gravity

A common canard of science fiction is that it's possible to artificially generate gravity on ships and space stations to simulate real-world gravity.

The thing is, artificial gravity is actually a pretty real thing, just not at the level of scale shown in most science fiction.

The most common method shown in Gundam is what is called "rotational" gravity, or gravity that mimics that generated by the Earth as it rotates on its axis.

The only reason real-life cannot do this as much as fiction is simply a matter of scale. Small-scale attempts at generating artificial gravity have been done before by agencies like NASA. Unfortunately, you'd need a lot of power to accurately simulate the gravitational field needed to create a rotating aperture simulating Earth's gravity.

That said, the science behind how it's shown in most Gundam shows is actually pretty solid.