CERESUltra

Andréa, Canis Lanonbinary

@CERESUltra

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CERESUltra
@CERESUltra
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Cyn-Cedilla
@Cyn-Cedilla

why is there coal in space

i don't normally scrutinize the hardness of the sci-fi in Gundam

but

it's the morning after watching Gundam F91 and i bolted awake with one thought in my head: "why is there coal in space?"

why is there coal in space?
why is coal an important resource in space?
were my subtitles just busted? was it not supposed to be coal?

did they take a coal bed from Earth, launch it into space, and deposit it in a colony so they could mine it later?

why would they mine coal? every colony has a bazillion space-based giant solar panels for energy. and if that's somehow not enough we see in this movie that they have functioning fusion reactors?!

F91 raises a lot of questions, the biggest being "how fucked up was the production of this media object" but "why is there coal in space" is a close second

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in reply to @Cyn-Cedilla's post:

graham
@graham

Fusion reactors are complex and big. Solar cells are great but only if you can store or transfer the energy to where it's needed effectively. Coal (if you ignore the very significant climate impact) allows you to have an extremely portable energy source that isn't dependent on the lifetime of a battery.

Looking up what it's made of: is mostly carbon, and sometimes hydrogen, sulfur, nitrogen, and oxygen, which are all things that can be produced pretty easily from suns as they supernova. There's probably already coal in space somewhere

Another reason to consider it is that it has previously been used to make iron from iron ore. Iron is a big resource in space, and being able to mine it from asteroids and then use the coal you're mining right nearby to power a processing plant in space would allow you to build hulking metal robots in space where you could avoid the extra cost of getting it to escape your planet's pull if you had to build it ground-side

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Cyn-Cedilla
@Cyn-Cedilla

buddy, I'm sorry, but there is absolutely not "already coal in space somewhere". it's a fossil fuel. you need photsynthetic biochemistry, active hydrological, geological, and carbon cycles, and millions of years of slow chemical reactions under immense pressure to turn elementary carbon and hydrogen into fossil fuel carbohydrates

of all the silly things in Gundam, this sticks out to me because like, the entire rest of this show is concerned about The Limited Resources Of Earth, and The Stewardship Of Earth, and The Pollution Of Earth, and How Earth And The Colonies Are Different, then F91 tells us there's a "resource extraction colony" where they mine coal? you built the colony! you put the coal there! did you take it from Earth! you must have??? did you synthesize coal at extraordinary cost (definitely net negative energy) just so you could... mine it? embed it under megatons of artificial mountain for... safekeeping??? sure you need coal for non-energy industrial processes but like... keep it in a warehouse??? please?

I'll be over this in a day or two, but for now, F91 and its throwaway line about coal has completely busted my brain and i am mad online about it

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graham
@graham

Damn, yeah I forgot about the geologic part when I saw the chemicals were simple.

I wouldn't put it past fiction to have the answer to the Fermi paradox be discovering coal on other planets, but I agree that it's bad writing given the rest of the context

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amaranth-witch
@amaranth-witch

My working theory (I have no evidence for this, it is pure conjecture but it is intertwined with the fucked-up production, which gave it life) is that from a non-diegetic perspective, "coal in space" started life similar to the "actually pretty portable, non-expiring, mineral-based burn fuel for fusion" comment already in thread, but wasn't "coal" at this point

and somewhere along the line, either notes got dropped, or the writers responsible were sacked or quit, or someone higher-up in the chain was all "I don't understand, what is this Space Material, change it to something I understand" or even something I've seen my own work get changed to; someone asks "what is (thing)" and you go "oh, it's (explanation)" and they go "huh?" and you reach for a metaphor or simile to help with the description and say "well, think of it this way, it's, well, it's like coal; it has these properties but also narratively it serves as something to fight over and something to ground viewers in parallels to..." and they go "yeah, got it"
but all they actually HEARD was "it's coal" and bam, that's what they tell everyone else and now it's just coal, now and forever

from a diegetic perspective, unless we're gonna ride the wild-ramifications train to things decidedly more Harlock in nature than Gundam, because we could be all "oh that implies nonterrestrial life, possibly weird-ass spaceborn and yet still carbon-adjacent life with... space... geological... uhm..." or "THE ASTEROID IS CARRYING ALIEN COAL" but honestly, I've got nothing.

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Cyn-Cedilla
@Cyn-Cedilla

I will say, from my weed-hazed memory, the actual context in which coal is mentioned is a single throwaway line used to justify why they are maneuvering the Good(ish) Guy Space Ship into a particular position during a battle inside one of the colony cylinders. "we'll be safe here, they won't shoot at us because we're on top of a coal deposit" (because the Bad(ish) Guys want the colony as a resource base for their new cool space empire). That's literally it. It's not integral to or crucial to the plot or world in any way, but it really just lodged itself deep in my brain. You could literally have the exact same movie without the 3 seconds that's got me and a half dozen other chosters writing essays about Space Coal.

The other thing going on here is that F91 is just drowning in these sorts of expository statements. The dialogue is so stilted because every time anybody does anything (in a movie that cuts extremely quickly constantly to cram as much plot as it can into every five minute chunk), they say why they're doing it in a way that is like, clearly intended for the viewer of the movie and not the character(s) they're actually talking to?

This also sticks out like a sore thumb because previous UC/Tomino Gundam is actually lacking in exposition (sometimes to good effect and sometimes in a way that's frustrating) and it just feels like a wild overcompensation? I'm still skimming through the production history linked in an above comment and listening to the Great Gundam Project episode but my understanding is Tomino's mental health was suffering at the time and there are things in this movie that feel like hypersensitive reactions to criticism of his previous work?

Space Coal!

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