Talking about Gundam, how bout mass drivers from Gundam seed? xD
No idea how to make them work though..
And elevator, nah the whole world would have to work towards such a plan, and seeing our current situation its highly unlikely, and would create a nice tasty target for terrorists :>
TBH a meteor would likely not be an issue - a man made disaster (or lack of maintenance) would be the likely problem. Any big meteor would be detected quite likely (and easily taken care of) if we had the ability to make this structure. Any small meteor would not do much dmg, and low odds of it being hit. A once in a hundred year solar flare would cause bigger issues (involving the electronics).
Lets say you are putting a load of rocket fuel into orbit for interplanetary flights - for some reason, the "rails" that the lift rides on (any vehicle going up and down the space elevator would be traveling under its on inertia, probably some sort of magnetic field) and the a fire starts. Odds of such a thing might be low, but when such an object would be meant to stand for centuries and would have all of the earths payload going into space - the amount of material moving along it during its lifetime....lets just say I would not be surprised of it looked more like a constant procession of 1000m cargo ships going up and down the line. the .0000001% chance adds up over a few hundred years.
'Twas a cutlass swipe or an ounce of lead
Or a yawing hole in a battered head
And the scuppers clogged with rotting red
And there they lay I damn me eyes
All lookouts clapped on Paradise
All souls bound just contrarywise, yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!
Japan, please do this now!