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-Z- (z@gundam.com)
Sun, 12 Nov 2000 14:34:35 -0800
Mark, I've been going over the UC chronology and I still don't think it's likely
that the Minovsky-Ionescu fusion reactor was the first practical fusion power
plant in the Gundam world.
25-year-old Y.T. Minovsky began building his more efficient "closed-type" space
colonies in Side 3 (L2) in UC 0035, by which time Sides 1 (L5) and 2 (L4) had
already doing a brisk business and Von Braun City had been in place for eight
years.
The total population reached 11 billion, with 40% (nearly five billion) living
in space in UC 0040, just five years after work on Side 3 began.
The Minovsky Physics Society wasn't founded until UC 0045, by which time
asteroid 3Juno was already in place as Luna 2.
Work on the M-I reactor didn't begin until UC 0047 and, within three years after
that, the Spacenoid population had virtually doubled to 82% (nine billion). I
don't see any date of completeion or entry into general service for the M-I
reactor; the next mention is the observation of what would become known as
Minovsky particle effects in the M-I reaction in UC 0065, by which time Side 3
had seceded and was no longer sharing its technology.
If the M-I reactor was the first practical fusion system, they'd've had to have
built the first three Sides, established at least one Lunar colony, moved a
major asteroid to the Earth Sphere, and emigrated at least five and perhaps as
many as seven billion people, all without any form of fusion power. Solar
energy would be cheap and abundant, but thrusters would've been chemical, ionic,
mass driver, fissionable or fission/fusion impulse devices, not the
thermonuclear rocket that's become standard by UC 0079.
I just can't buy that.
Every space colonization plan that I've ever seen presumes practical (if not
"compact" like the M-I) fusion power, made possible first by Lunar He3 and later
by Jovian He3, at some point.
I really think that they must've had a practical, if not compact or cheap,
fusion power prior to the development of the M-I. There's just too much done in
too short a time, even pushing the start date of the UC out from 2045 to 2081,
for them not to have it. For that matter, I can't imagine them seriously
beginning such an undertaking without it, a belief reinforced by the admittedly
apochryphal launch date of the JEF, twenty years prior to the start of
construction on Side 1.
-Z-
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