This week, we review and analyze Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ (機動戦士ガンダムΖΖ) episode 17 - “Retrieve the Core Top!” (奪回!コア·トップ) - discuss our first impressions, and provide commentary and research on maglev trains.

This episode comes with content warnings - repeated incidents of strangulation, one of which depicts a character strangling one of his female friends, and a scene depicting an adult woman sexually assaulting a teenage boy. We discuss these scenes extensively in the recap and talkback portion of the episode.

If you would like to skip those discussions, we recommend you listen to the Radio Free Shangri-La, then skip ahead to the research portion:

- Wikipedia, Britannica, and How Stuff Works pages for maglev trains.

- Wikipedia page for linear motor.

- Webpage on the history of maglev trains from Northeast Maglev, a current high-speed maglev project in the USA.

- Overview of maglev train history and technology from the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory.

- Two discussions of the pros and cons of current maglev projects, one from railway-industry news and analysis site, Railway-Technology.com, and one from The Washington Post.

Mobile Suit Breakdown is written, recorded, and produced within Lenapehoking, the ancestral and unceded homeland of the Lenape, or Delaware, people. Before European settlers forced them to move west, the Lenape lived in New York City, New Jersey, and portions of New York State, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Connecticut. Lenapehoking is still the homeland of the Lenape diaspora, which includes communities living in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario.

You can learn more about Lenapehoking, the Lenape people, and ongoing efforts to honor the relationship between the land and indigenous peoples by visiting the websites of the Delaware Tribe and the Manhattan-based Lenape Center. Listeners in the Americas and Oceania can learn more about the indigenous people of your area at https://native-land.ca/. We would like to thank The Lenape Center for guiding us in creating this living land acknowledgment.

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The intro music is WASP by Misha Dioxin, and the outro is Long Way Home by Spinning Ratio, both licensed under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 licenses. The recap music for Season 3 is New York City (instrumental) by spinningmerkaba, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.. All music used in the podcast has been edited to fit the text.

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