Gundam

Laplace

★

By Jenxi Seow

Published

Updated

Laplace was a space colony in Earth orbit built by the Earth Federation. It served as the official residence of the Federation’s Prime Minister.

Description

Laplace was a Standford Torus type space colony built in Earth orbit. It was made up of a central torus residential block with two rings of solar panels above and below the torus. The solar panels generated solar power and also reflected sunlight into the interior of the torus.

The ring-shaped residential block spun at seventy-five seconds per rotation to generate artificial gravity similar to that of the Moon. The ring was connected to a hub via four spokes that served as transport corridors from the torus to the hub. The hub experienced the least artificial gravity and thus was best suited for spacecraft docking. A non-rotating axis attached to the hub was home to zero-gravity industry.

A Baoa Qu at L2
A Baoa Qu at Lagrangian Point L2

History

The space colony was built at the end of the Common Era calendar. It was used by the Earth Federation Prime Minister Ricardo Marcenas.

The Federation held a ceremony at Laplace to mark the end of the Common Era and herald the beginning of the Universal Century. During the ceremony, Prime Minister Marcenas delivered a speech on the new charter of the Universal Century and declared each law from the new constitution. As he read the constituional laws, a machine carved them into a stone tablet through laser engraving.

Warning: Spoilers ahead.

The Prime Minister’s son George Marcenas led an extreme right-wing conservative faction within the Federation. The group rejected Ricardo Marcenas and his ideology of space colonisation with hope that the space colonists would evolve and guide humanity on the right path.

George Marcenas hired a group of terrorists to attack the ceremony. The terrorists reprogrammed solar panels of the upper disk to focus solar rays on the residential block. This melted and ruptured the walls of the torus to cause decompression that killed everyone in the residential ring. When the terrorists fled, their space shuttle exploded due to sabotage, killing all of them except Syam Vist. Vist found the stone tablet drifting in space and kept it.

George Marcenas succeeded his father as prime minister of the Federation. Although replicas of the original charter were retained, they were modified by the conservatives to remove the law that stated, “In the future, should the emergence of a new space-adapted human race be confirmed, the Earth Federation shall give priority to involving them in the administration of the government.”

The Federation blamed spacenoids for the terrorist attack on Laplace, swinging popular opinion against the spacenoids. The Federation placed harsh restrictions on the rights of spacenoids and forced all space colonies to be placed under the rule of the Federation.

The prime minister’s residence on Laplace was declared a forbidden location. However, Syam blackmailed the Federation with the original charter, which was later code named Laplace’s Box. He established the Vist Foundation to defend the only evidence that could expose the conspiracy buried by the Federation.

In UC 0096, the ruins of Laplace were destroyed in a battle between the RX-0 Unicorn Gundam and the MSN-06S Sinanju. The debris burnt up in the atmosphere as they drifted into the Earth’s gravity.

Appearances