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Vintage Gundam trivia break time again! Here's a page from Vol.5 of B-Club magazine (March 1986) with what I believe is some relatively rare setting art of the "Shangri-La" space colony from Gundam ZZ. Let's enhance!
The main commercial spaceport, or "bay," is on the end facing away from the sun - the stem of the banana, if you will. The sunward end has a single large hatch which is used to dump junk inside the colony.
Shangri-La is segregated lengthwise along class lines. The posh "Yamanote" (foothills) area is next to the bay, then we have the ordinary residential district, the lower-class "Shitamachi" and industrial district...
...and, at the far (sunward) end of the colony, a junk district filled with towering scrapheaps that spill out over the colony's windows and can be seen from outside.
Here's a cross section of the colony. The cloud layer is about 1km above the ground level, so line of sight across the cylinder - sort of an inverted horizon - is limited to 4.5km.
And here's a view down the length of the cylinder, from the mountains above the posh end of the colony (described here as "like Rodeo Drive") across "main street", the slums and factories, and the distant scrap mountains.
It's fascinating that the class politics of Gundam ZZ - and, because this was the most detailed workup of a space colony thus far, of the overall Gundam series - are etched so boldly into every aspect of the setting design.
It's tempting to re-examine the other depictions of space colony life in the series with this in mind. If you're really nerdy, Wave also makes a scale model of a space settlement, designed by Studio Nue's Kazutaka Miyatake. See: https://ourstarblazers.com/vault/ssmodelart/
I don't have many other ZZ-related notes for now. I'm still in the middle of @GundamPodcast's Zeta Gundam coverage right now, and I have so many more unanswerable questions about that series than I do about ZZ...
