Universal Century Technology

Universal Century technology are technologies from the Universal Century timeline of the Gundam anime metaseries. Although they are only fictional technologies, they form the basics of the Real Robot genre of anime and is influencing real life academic research and different anime series.

The Universal Century technologies debuted in Gundam Century, written by editors, academy and studios hired by OUT magazine at that time, later part of the book was endorsed by Sunrise and Bandai, and some of the authors of the articles within Gundam Century became official editors and writers of Gundam mechanics. A main part of the book surrounds the discussion on real-life technologies including space habitats and mass driver. Later, following the trend of militaristic and technological interest in the community, Gundam Sentinel Special Edition included a section called imidam 0093 (Innovative Mobile Suit Information Dictionary, Annual Series, intentionally using an m at the end to reference Gundam), subtitled "Basic Knowledge of Gundam Mechanics". Written by mechanical designer Katoki Hajime, summarized both in- and out-of-universe technologies of the Universal Century, sourcing from Gundam Century, Gun Sight, VF-1 Valkyrie, MS Graphical Guide 1~3, MSV Technical & History 1~3. Gundam Officials has collected this information and has presented it along with plot history and character summaries in an encyclopedic form, and MS Encyclopedia 2003 has a short technical summary of these technologies in its first section before going into the lists of mobile weapons in different series, which earlier editions only have.

Although fictional technologies seems to carry no real-life significance, these technologies are referred to in almost all of the series of Universal Century. They became a normal reference of the serial story and attracted publishers to publish books on. These technological settings have also since then impacted a lot of anime and manga to have their own technological background to a certain degree. Although this could be viewed as following the Star Wars trend, nothing similar has started before the 1981 publishing of Gundam Century. Bandai (with its branch Sunrise) noticed the tradition and has hired writers to write articles for other Gundam series, too. In the Cosmic Era timeline, one of the authors of Gundam Century articles (while still a high school student at that time), Shigeru Morita, who had become a regular employee of Bandai, was assigned to write these kind of technological articles, possibly a method used by the company to attract Universal Century techno fans to watch the new series. The series' technology is now serving as inspiration of the academic research in different fields, that could include moon settlements and mega-particle cannon.

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