Cosmic Era Gundam

"Year 70 of the Cosmic Era. Tensions between the PLANTs and Earth were at an all time high since the conflict began. It was first assumed that the Earth forces, with their superior numbers, would be victorious, but these initial assessments proved to be false."

Cosmic Era Gundam is the first AU Gundam series of the 2000s, and the first postdating the "capstone" of the franchise in Turn A Gundam. The world of Cosmic Era Gundam uses many Gundam standards, starting out as a similar-but-distinct retelling of Universal Century Gundam's first outing, but steadily shifts further and further from that initial narrative.

Mobile Suit Gundam SEED

The Earth Alliance and its wayward colonies, the PLANTs, have been at war for a year; the war feeds on a combination of genuine desperation in the PLANTs a combination of racial animus between Earth's unaugmented "Natural" humans and the PLANTs' genetically-engineered Coordinators. After the destruction of a neutral colony revealed to have secretly hosted an Earth Alliance weapons development program, the colonial refugees find themselves fighting in a war they may not believe in simply to survive. The only available mobile suit pilot, a youth named Kira Yamato, is a Coordinator, now drawn into the war on the side of the Alliance and its Naturals... but is there another path, or are the two sides doomed to destroy one another?

Integration Notes

The following are things that had to change, be adjusted, or be removed as part of Cosmic Era Gundam's integration on SRTMOO. There's a lot here, so we've broken this into subcategories.

Political

The supranational unions are distinct from those in Gundam SEED. The Atlantic Federation has been more or less completely subsumed by the Britannian Union. The Eurasian Federation, meanwhile, has had many of its key notes and holdings given to Front Mission's Organization of African Consolidation; the show's pitch for the Eurasian Federation didn't mesh especially well with the Anno Domini Gundam/After Colony Gundam-inspired Advanced European Union, while the OAC had little modern content due to its primary source game in Front Mission being set nearly a century earlier.
ZAFT has fewer friends on Earth, in general, due to the differing setup. It instead has a robust alliance with Martian Successor Nadesico's Jovian Federation, and a somewhat looser alliance with the Sleeves.
The Orb Union has existed for longer than implied in the show.
The two member families of the Five Families of Orb that are not detailed in Gundam SEED, Gundam SEED Astray, or Gundam SEED Destiny are Banpresto Originals's Centrum family and the Peacelands of Martian Successor Nadesico.
Blue Cosmos shares space with other heavily racist organizations like Code Geass's Britannian Purist Faction and... ... whatever dark night of the collective soul is going on in Universal Century Gundam.
Many of the politically relevant Coordinator families were previously part of After Colony Gundam's Romefeller Foundation/Organization of the Zodiac and chose the name Zodiac Alliance for their political party out of overwhelming spite.

Technological

Due to the difference in primary civilian power generation method, many other themes needing nuclear fission, and those that don't instead having nuclear fusion, N-Jammers and N-Jammer Cancellers have been essentially totally scrapped. ZAFT has instead bombed out about half of the power generation capacity of the Orbital Ring. ZGMF-X MS use current-generation (and quite powerful) Minovsky-Ionescu compact fusion reactors, unlike most ZAFT MS, which use the same solar batteries as Knightmare Frames and Wanzers.
In general, due to other shows' contributions, a lot of the things that are extremely unique in Cosmic Era Gundam aren't as unique. Coordinator-use MS are distinguished primarily by their OSes and their insane cost-to-performance ratio, rather than being the only game in town. The G-Project, similarly, is an effort to cross-copy most of the things that are good about Coordinator-use MS without needing Coordinator-use OS.

Miscellaneous

Ulen Hibiki's research background is somewhat more robustly detailed than in the show. The details of this will be made available to a Kira, Rau, or Cagalli player.
While we accept applications for Gundam SEED Astray characters (as well as those more thoroughly fleshed out in Astray, such as the Orb Union test team and Shiho Hahnenfuss), we have not used Astray in informing our worldbuilding very much if at all, other than a few token references; players interested in characters reliant on Librarian Works or Astray's take on Mars in particular should contact staff to hammer out how to make these elements work out.