Orbital Ring

The Orbital Ring is a ring around the Earth, anchored by three space elevators.

In addition to housing an enormous number of solar panels, the Orbital Ring serves as the anchor point for the Neo-Colonies. A mag-lev train system makes travel between any two anchored colonies trivial.

Many pieces of Earth's defense network are also anchored to the Orbital Ring; together, these make up the Big Barrier, a seven-stage defensive system to stop things from traversing the atmosphere freely. The Big Barrier also stands at full activity during the Survival Eleven period of the Gundam Fight to prevent participants from going off-Earth to cheat their way through the Fight. Since the start of the war with the PLANTs, however, the Big Barrier has gotten steadily weaker as both ZAFT and Nergal have undertaken operations that damaged, pierced, or destroyed it.

The Orbital Ring colonies use the gravitic landing generators of Zentradi craft destroyed in the Zentradi War to provide constant, 100% stable Earth-like gravity and defense against space debris.