Editing Girls und Panzer (section)

===The Setting ===

GuP's alternate timeline is very similar to our own, with a few major exceptions; firstly, simulated tank combat is an extremely popular sport for girls of all ages, and second that most major high schools are built on to gigantic travelling city- ships. The justification for the first conceit is that, in the post-Versailles years of the 1920s, the German government reframed tank training as an educational activity for young women to throw international observers off the trail of their growing rearmaments program. The idea stuck and apparently persisted well though World War 2, which happened as it did in our world, and the sport of Sensha-dou (a somewhat untranslatable pun -- it literally means "the way of the tank", analogous to e.g. ''kendo'' : "the way of the sword" -- officially translated as "tankery", also called "Panzerkraft" in some fan translations) is common to this day. Sensha-dou is seen as a valuable sport teaching teamwork, honour, tactical and mechanical skills, and gentlewomanly professionalism. In practice, what this means is that grade schoolers get to drive tankettes around and by the time they've hit university they're piloting 1950s-era heavy tanks like sportscars. Talk about a /k/ommando's dream world.  (Also, while everyone ''talks'' about sensha-dou teaching valuable character traits to young women, it's still a high-stakes high school sport, with all of the attendant pressures from overbearing parents, government interference, and high-school drama.)

The second conceit, that all schools are built on city-sized aircraft carriers (large enough to have their own ''geography'') is a little bit less well-explained. Apparently these ships are crewed primarily by students, with different students assigned to roles like engine maintenance, navigation, hydroponics, etc. Each school is functionally self-sufficient, though most have a home city where they have frequently dock, and they make regular trips around their home regions.