Universal Century Technology - Cultural Significance

Cultural Significance

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.

The latest robot technology in Japan is also influenced by Gundam, due to its fictional technologies being highly adapted from real world science, and the Universal Century technologies including space colonies and mobile suits are also viewed academically as to what they can do in real life.