Has anyone addressed in a story or actually written a story about the people who have to rescue space battle survivors and clean up all the dead bodies in space?
Like if someone wasn't doing it, and people in space navies didn't believe that if there was a chance they survived that someone would come save them, then it would be pretty hard to motivate people to fight. In IRL history, even enemy navies would rescue enemy sailors after a battle, if it was practical.
In the UC series, an incomprehensible number of people ended up spaced, or adrift waiting for rescue. Were the Fedies and Zeeks just like, "Lol, sucks to be you", when it came to after a battle when there were huge sections of ships that probably had crew members slowly suffocating in their normal suits, or escape pods drifting in the vast nothingness?
Planetes is basically this minus warfare and mecha
That would basically be the story of founding Buch Concern. Would have been a better UC100 pitch than UC2
In all seriousness there can't be a soul in the UC universe that isn't completely mentally fricked from the wars and genocides. By the end of Char's Counter Attack, how many humans are even left. The opening of the 1 year war cost humanity like what, 50% of the total population?
There must be rings of dead bodies orbiting large asteroids and larger ship debris, if no one is cleaning it up. Hell dead body rings around some colonies.
UC universe may be more grimdark than 40K.
Buch Concern made it's fortune on salvage operations which later on funded the Crossbone Vanguard. Later on Crossbone worked under disguise as Blackrow Shipping, another salvage company, which was still functional and doing very well during Zanscare war.
A barely explored, yet fascinating aspect of UC is how human population is constantly dwindling. After OYW every conflict is much smaller in scale because there simply isn't enough people for it, and it's only getting worse because mobile suit technology is advancing rapidly and a single person with minimal training can kill hundreds of civilians with zero difficulty, not to mention the fragility of colonies. I wouldn't be surprised if circa f91 there was less than a billion of us left.
>not to mention the fragility of colonies.
Making colonies that fragile was a mistake. The type of structure that can house 10 to 20 million people comfortably inside along with supporting infrastructure would require tens of billions of tonnes of steel. The sheer scale would be unheard of and beyond massive. The walls and supports required would be tremendously thick, and be one of the strongest structures ever constructed by mankind.
Regular explosives would not make a dent. Even a nuke wouldnt destroy it (since we know armored naval ships can survive nuclear explosions).
It's so ridiculous when we see a mobile suit easily destroy the side wall of a colony like it's tissue paper.
>It's so ridiculous when we see a mobile suit easily destroy the side wall of a colony like it's tissue paper.
They were shooting through the glass clear opening where it is the thinnest. You can't say colonies are fragile when it literally survive a reentry long enough for it to be dropped even though it is unlikely in reality
They were never depicted as fragile in the series though.
I suppose I didn't phrase it quite right. It's less that colonies are fragile (they're not, really) but mobile suits are uniquely predisposed for destroying them quickly and easily due to beam weaponry being just too powerful combined with speed and maneuverability, not to mention reactor explosions.
>but mobile suits are uniquely predisposed for destroying them quickly and easily due to beam weaponry being just too powerful combined with speed and maneuverability, not to mention reactor explosions.
We never see a single colony get totally demolished or destroyed by any number of mobile suits, discounting AU stuff. Although mobile suits keep blowing holes in colonies to get in and out, someone once calculated that for the size of the average O'Neill cylinder, a hole big enough for a mobile suit to pass through (10 meters wide?) would take years to drain all the air out of a colony.
Also, let's not forget the Feds fired on the Operation British colony as it passed them with all the ships they had, and it wasn't enough to destroy it, although it did get weakened enough that it fell apart later during atmospheric entry.
beam weapons shoot hot plasma that goes through steel like it's nothing.
it's probably way to expensive to make the colonies beam resistant
Most of them got vaporized into space dusts. I supposed their escape pods have some signals to alert rescue teams. The way MS combat works tend to leave few survivors. Those escaped tend to have their suits intact enough to either go back to their ships or go to a new ship
i'm still salty Twilight Axis animation was such an incoherent slideshow of a disaster, it could have been a perfect connection point between the events of late-early UC and the F91 era.
Being part of the orbital cleanup crew must be pretty damn grim, though I wouldn't be surprised if finding and identifying corpses to send them back to their families is a thing as well.
That is if the corpses hadn't decayed quickly due to lack of oxygen, heat or anything substantial in outer space.
Decay of biological material typically only happens if there's bacteria and oxygen. Without oxygen, it's a lot easier to preserve a person's remains. A person who dies of suffocation from a punctured/unsealed space suit might be preserved relatively well, while someone who died in a sealed space suit would decompose to a fair degree.
Punctured space suits would also lead to the corpse being functionally freeze-dried. The vacuum would suck out most of the water, which would also chill the body via evaporative cooling. You'd get something like the "ice mummies" you find at high altitudes.
A story revolving the protagonist scraping through the space to find people would probably be lacking in action so it's not the best setting for mecha maybe.
Votoms: Chirico in Votoms after entering cold sleep with Fiana in the end of the TV series got picked up by some space vulture guy in Shining Heresy to kickstart the story, but I don't think they went any deeper other than saying "in Votoms universe, people loot the space battlefields and sometimes find a few living people and 'rescue' whoever is alive".
UC series: I mean there's like a ton of abandoned colonies in OYW and they probably cleaned most of them up by Zeta, but I don't think the story of cleaning them up goes beyond narrations or other less major works. I don't even remember why Kamille and Quattro found the gassed colony mostly unscathed.
Gundam Seed: I thought Astray or some sidestory talked about finding Mu near Jachin Due and converting him but I have no supporting info.
the buddhist faction in Thunderbolt salvaged fallen MS and religiously cremated the pilots
yes it is literally Gundam Thunderbolt explaining who is collecting dead bodies and cremating them in UC