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tinyozlion · 8 months

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Howard: Wastin’ Away Again in Margaritaville, Some People Claim a Mobile Suit Is to Blame

In light of the recent passing of Jimmy Buffett, let us pay our respects by talking about Howard:

The man, the myth, the fashion icon; part of the first generation of mobile suit engineers, designer of the Tallgeese and the Peacemillion, rocket scientist, honorary member of the Five Doctors Polycule, weed guy to Duo and OZ’s best, a man so thoroughly chill he brought Island Time (and his sunglasses) with him into space.

Howard is one of those brilliant people who was in the unenviable position of working in a field where their discoveries and advancements are often co-opted for use by militaries looking for any kind of technological or strategic edge– that’s most fields, by the way. The entertainment industry gets scooped by the military. Even paleontology¹ sometimes gets scooped by the military. But Howard is an aerospace engineer and robotics expert, and those lend themselves to being exploited more than most, particularly because they often rely on the kind of big-budget funding that only the military industrial complex can provide.

“Mobile Suits are nearly as old as the colonies themselves. When man took his first steps into space and started building new structures in the heavens, it was clear that new tools would be needed to perform the construction. Mobile Suits evolved from early motorized spacesuits and spacecraft manipulator arms. [...]Whether humanoid or pod-shaped, early mobile suits were any mechanized craft or suit that had the ability to perform complex manipulations. While Mobile Suits were originally intended for use in space, it was soon discovered that their versatility was easily adapted for terrestrial use as well. The new Earth-bound MS became more humanoid in shape, as ‘legs’ allowed the large machines to become truly all-terrain.” –Mobile Suit Gundam Wing Technical Manual

(I was so excited when I noticed these guys. There they are! The original MS! Of the get-your-hands-off-her-you-bitch Xenomorph-punching variety!)

Mobile Suits weren’t always war machines; they had a perfectly respectable start as construction exo-suits designed for Colony building and other elements of space infrastructure. Plenty of engineers and scientists who would have been involved in developing Colony tech and space exploration would also probably have been involved with Mobile Suit design; when those projects came under Alliance control, those same engineers would find themselves making weapons, and whatever other notable human advancements they might have been working on– interstellar travel, Mars terraforming, nanotech etc., would be shelved for the foreseeable future.

But that wouldn’t necessarily be huge bummer news for people like Howard or the Gundam scientists– working for an unscrupulous organization might go against their conscience, but who doesn’t love a cool robot? Howard, like many people in the After Colony timeline and our own, is a Mobile Suit nerd who is just as fascinated by the idea of a big damn hero machine with a beam sword and rockets as the rest of us.

That’s just the duality of Man, man.

Luckily for everyone, once OZ started mass production of Mobile Suits, Howard and the five Gundam scientists who had been working on the Tallgeese project all took their ball and went home. The others left for the Colonies to start building OZ’s worst nightmare, gundanium Mobile Suits that would outclass anything that had been built on earth; Howard, on the other hand, took the route of passive resistance. VERY passive resistance.

…Well, he’d LIKE it to be this relaxed all the time, but Howard nevertheless finds himself helping wayward Gundam pilots and rehabilitating ex-OZ aces whenever they drop by, using his crane-operating salvage ship as an unofficial mobile base for the resistance. Later, Peacemillion serves the same function in space, eventually housing ALL the Gundams and their allies in their fight against White Fang.

So Howard ends up being pretty busy for a retired guy who just wants to crack open a cold one with the boys and watch the sunset off shore of Key West. But who better to remind a crew of hyper-vigilant, stressed out pilots to chill out once and a while?

Take it from a man in a hot pink Hawaiian shirt: slow down and get some rest. Remember, if you don't schedule time for maintenance, your equipment (or your body) will schedule it for you.

_ ______________________ _

1) Hadrosaur dental batteries are apparently so weird and unique that they have material science applications that the DoD was interested in. I’m going out on a limb here because this is apparently unpublished stuff as of writing this, but HEY it’s an opportunity to plug The Skeleton Crew– who do NOT typically talk about the military industrial complex, but are in fact very cool professional paleontologists who make excellent dinosaur content videos. And now, back to the giant robots. 2) If you’re reading this, you’re a NERD.

#gundam wing #tallgeese #Mobile Suits #HOWARD #parsing post #tinyozlion pgw

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wordsandrobots · 9 months

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IBO reference notes on . . . mobile suit designations

And now for some deeply useless observations on how mobile suits are labeled in Iron-Blooded Orphans.

(I’m purely looking at this ‘in fiction’; I know most of these are in fact in-jokes based on the mecha designers’ names.)

Starting with the titular Gundam frames, these are each designated ASW-G-XX, where XX is a number between 01 and 72 (or literally XX for Vidar). We have no canonical explanation for what ‘ASW’ means, but all other types of mobile suit have a similar letter string in their codes. I personally favour the idea it references the manufacturer, and that each frame family represents the work of a different group, but there’s nothing backing that up.

Interestingly, the mobile armours are *not* given identification codes. Given that they bear the same symbol as the Gundams on key components, however, we might suppose that using ASW-A or something like that would make sense, in a ‘underlining the obvious connection’ fashion. (Well, now I’ve said that, this might only apply to Hashmal and Harael; Ananel and Nemamiah look distinct enough to have come from different manufacturers.)

Valkyrja frames, meanwhile, follow a slightly more impenetrable logic:

V03-0907 Oltlinde

V04-0630 Waltraute

V07-0126 Sigrún

V08-1228 Grimgerde

We can presumably add V0_-0526 Helmwige, based on the V08Re-0526 Helmwige Reincar (AKA the Grimgerde in new clothes), although we don’t know what its prefix number is supposed to be.

Graze frame codes, by contrast, run thus:

EB-05s Schwalbe Graze

EB-06 Graze

EB-06j Graze Ground Type

EB-06N Graze Stachel

EB-06Q Graze Schild

EB-06r Graze Ritter

EB-06rs Graze Ritter Commander Type

EB-06s Graze Commander Type

EB-06t Graze Trainer Type

I don’t know if the capitalisation is meant to be meaningful. I would assume not since there’s nothing particularly special about the Stachel and Schild that would make them stand out from the pack (they’re basically different equipment sets on a standard Graze. The Schwalbe is the prototype for the frame, and is numbered straight on from the Geirail, EB-04. Currently, no model has been designated EB-07 but based on the above, we can assume it was the prototype for the Reginlaze.

The AEB-06L Hloekk Graze has a modified numbering convention, presumably because it is a modified Graze. But I’m not sure what to do with the EB-AX2 Graze Ein. It’s not really a custom (more on which later), nor does it have a proper place in this lineage, though design elements would be incorporated into the Reginlaze Julia. It’s just this weird outlier monster prototype thing.

Regardless, the two mainline Reginlaze variants follow the same schema as Grazes:

EB-08 Reginlaze

EB-08s Reginlaze Commander Type

Moving out of Gjallarhorn, the standard configuration for the Hexa frame has two versions,

IPP-0032 Gilda

IPP-0032S Gilda SAU

Which are basically the same thing with differing load-outs. We see IPP-0032 in the context of construction models hijacked for the purposes of insurrection, and the IPP-0032S fielded by the SAU military. Then we get:

IPP-18875 Enzo

IPP-66305 Hugo

The Hugo is the most prominent Hexa in IBO proper, since ‘suits of this type are used by the Dawn Horizon Corps and JPT Trust. An Enzo, meanwhile, shows up as Range’s first machine in IBO:Urdr Hunt - and I’m saying ‘an Enzo’ because while the descriptions implies it’s fairly rare/unique, the numbering suggests it’s a type rather than a custom model.

This assumption is based on the pattern that continues with the Rodi frames, where standard mass-production models have simple ‘letter string hyphen alphanumerical’ codes:

UGY-R38 Spinner Rodi

UGY-R41 Man Rodi

UGY-R41 Landman Rodi

UGY-R45 Garm Rodi

No code has been given for the Monkey Rodis used by 598′s human debris crew, though they appear to be another Man Rodi variant. Perhaps oddly, there is no distinction between Man and Landman Rodis. Most other equipment swaps see some update to the numbering, leaving this an oddity. Then again, why would Tekkadan have bothered registering them under a new classification when they redid the legs?

Then we have the Teiwaz/Io frame mobile suits:

STH-05 Hyakuren

STH-05R Rouei

STH-14s Hyakuri

STH-16 Shiden

STH-20 Hekija

All of this essentially leaves us with two ‘genres’ of base mobile suit IDs: mass production types that have a consistent form like (ABC)-(ABC123), and lines of unique ‘suits where each is identified individually: ASW-G-XX, V0X-(1234).

Conclusions? Not many, but I would propose the machine specific codes for the mass-production types (that is, say, Crank Zent’s particular Graze) might follow the Valkyrja form of ID in having an addition numerical string. There’s no obvious reason for the Valkyrjas to be numbered so precisely since the implication in various materials is that there’s only nine of them, but if it is in fact following common practice (Ahab reactor number, maybe?) we might infer a more precise machine code running ‘ EB-06-0505′ or ‘IPP-18875-7007′.

What we don’t have to infer is the convention for custom models based on mass-production ‘suits, which is usually to append a string including the letter ‘c’ to the end of the ID. Thus we have:

EB-06/tc Graze Custom

EB-06/tc2 Ryusei-Go

EB-06/tc3 Ryusei-Go (repaired)

STH-16/tc Shiden Custom (Ryusei-Go III/Riden-Go)

STH-16/tc2 Orga's Shiden (The King’s Throne)

EB-08jjc Reginlaze Julia

MPM02/AC Triaina

STH-05/AC Amida's Hyakuren

UGY-R41/H Hakuri Rodi

EB-06/T2C Regal Lily

STH-14/T2C Kallisto

UGY-R41/T2C Labrys

To take these in sets -- ‘tc’ obviously stands for ‘Tekkadan Custom’. We have one based on Crank’s Graze getting up to ‘tc3′ before being retired in favour of a customised Shiden, and the King’s Throne as the second Shdien custom commissioned for Tekkadan.

The Julia is a ‘Julieta Juris Custom’. Given this is something being produced by the R&D division, we could label it a prototype ala the Graze Ein, but since the Julia is decidedly built with Julieta in mind, custom is the better term.

I didn’t include the Triaina previously because we only ever see one of them and it’s labelled the same way as Amida’s Hyakuren (AC), which we know is ‘custom built’ in the sense of being a pseudo-prototype made with better materials. So this might be a case of a limited run rather than unique unit.

The Hakuri Rodis are scrap-heap Man Rodis with cobbled-together armour (literally Brewers’ cast-offs found in a debris zone). It’s not surprising they break the pattern.

Tanto Tempo’s customs (T2C) make a pattern of labelling by organisation. Descriptions confirm the Labrys are customised by Tanto Tempo, so they’re not a sub-type in their own right, just a made-to-order variant of the Landman Rodi. Curiously, the Kallisto suggests the existence of a STH-14 model as distinct from the STH-14s Hyakuri. Or the ‘s’ just got dropped when Gianmarco ripped off the backpack.

From all of this, we might therefore conclude that the EB-04jc4 Geirail Scharfrichter is also a custom model. Its profile describes it as a sister machine to the normal Geirail, but it being unique to the mercenary company Mossa employs feels more sensible than it being some kind of standard variant (honestly, I usually forget it even exists).

Finally, there’s the matter of customised Gundams. These don’t generally see an addition to the number codes when they are updated, which might reflect an expectation they will be reconfigured semi-regularly (Kimaris certainly came with a lot of optional extras and it’s Dantalion’s whole gimmick). But nevertheless, common practice appears to be to add extra words to the name:

ASW-G-08 Gundam Barbatos Lupus

ASW-G-08 Gundam Barbatos Lupus Rex

ASW-G-11 Gundam Gusion Rebake

ASW-G-11 Gundam Gusion Rebake Full City

ASW-G-29 Gundam Astaroth Rinascimento

Gundam Hajiroboshi Alector

ASW-G-47 Gundam Vual Yuhana

ASW-G-66 Gundam Kimaris Trooper

ASW-G-66 Gundam Kimaris Vidar

Going back to V08Re-0526 Helmwige Reincar, we see this applied here as well, so theoretically, were there another line of individually IDed mobile suits, the same thing would apply to that.

And there you have it. I have no idea why I thought this was something I should write about but I did.

Other reference posts include:

IBO reference notes on … Gjallarhorn (Part 1)

IBO reference notes on … Gjallarhorn (Part 2)

IBO reference notes on … Gjallarhorn (corrigendum) [mainly covering my inability to recognise mythical wolves]

IBO reference notes on … three key Yamagi scenes

IBO reference notes on … three key Shino scenes

IBO reference notes on … three key Eugene scenes

IBO reference notes on … three key Ride scenes

IBO reference notes on … the tone of the setting

IBO reference notes on … character parallels and counterpoints

IBO reference notes on … a perfect villain

IBO reference notes on … Iron-Blooded Orphans: Gekko

IBO reference notes on … an act of unspeakable cruelty

IBO reference notes on … original(ish) characters [this one is mainly fanfic]

IBO reference notes on … Kudelia’s decisions

IBO reference notes on … assorted head-canons

IBO reference notes on … actual, proper original characters [explicit fanfic – as in, actually fanfic. None of them have turned up in the smut yet]

IBO reference notes on … the aesthetics of the mobile frame

#Gundam Iron-blooded Orphans #gundam ibo #Tekketsu no Orphans #g tekketsu #reference #notes #Mobile suits

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youreaclownnow · 10 months

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the mobile suits in victory gundam are soooo underrated. Them motherfuckers look like bugs! Badass huge bugs

#so freaking cool #and the victory itself is also awesome despite it not looking like a bug like these fellows #zanscare and zeon both went off when it come to mobile suits that are creatures #gundam #victory gundam #mobile suit gundam #mobile suits #zanscare

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the-notorius-bhg · 2 years

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Quatre is such a sweet kid, with possibly the most brutal, in-your-face, intimate fighting style.

Highly visible and a bit slower in terrestrial fighting than the other Gundams, he gives the enemy a chance to run before destroying them.

Precision, close combat melee fighting gives Quatre the ability to disable his foes with MS Gundam Sandrock twin heat shotels as a primary weapon, but when combined with the shield, backpack and heat shotels it forms the Cross Crusher, which is capable of capturing an enemy suit between a pincer-like claw before severing the target in half.

Brutal.

#gundam wing #gundam #quatre raberba winner #quatre #gundam sandrock #sandrock #mobile suits #weapons #gw archives scan #looks can be deceiving #dude even comes with his own support army

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amalgamasreal · 1 year

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Day 30: Big Boi Psycho Gundam is Here!

One Gundam a Day - by Affea

Source

#mobile suit gundam #gundam #mobile suits #too many gundams to tag them all #mobile suit zeta gundam #mrx-009 psycho gundam #gundam art #gundam fanart #look at all the little gundams 🥹#gundam timelines

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parsleysagerosemarytimemachine · 2 years

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Love Suletta's incredulousness at these duels -- you beat him before, and now he's come back with a newer better model to challenge you with? That's hardly sporting at all!

Also, this was the previous suit....

Maybe there's a good reason he's not piloting it again? I don't think you can snap those pieces back together after that. :)

#gundam #witch from mercury #Suletta #Ariel #mobile suits #spoilers #sort of #this is kind of how the show goes

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lordgrimoire · 11 months

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MSG:TWFM House Mobile Suit Headcannons

The Demi-Trainers have so many variants and differing models that no one can rightly figure out where the original Demi-Trainers came from, only that the Asticassia Printers are able to print off the parts for this one variant.

Any and all other Mobile Suits have to be shipped in by Sponsors, Students, Families of said Students, or by the School Itself. This means that the best place to go for spares would be the loading bay, where you are more than likely to find some forgotten parts.

#mobile suit gundam: the witch from mercury #gundam the witch from mercury headcannons #gundam the witch from mercury #the witch from mercury #mobile suits

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lumi-klovstad-games · 9 months

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The Gundam Game I desperately want that I will probably never get is a spiritual sequel to 0079: Rise From Ashes.

A cockpit-view FPS, no Super Prototype MS, the smallest handful of Ace Custom units (so when you finally DO get to fly them you can really appreciate how superior they are, and it feels like you've moved up in the ranks), with players overwhelmingly using basic mass production grunt mobile suits, and they never even SEE a Gundam in the game.

It'd probably be a team-based multiplayer FPS, probably with randomized objectives beyond simply "blow up enemy team real good".

But it'd be cool to have the suits have a real sense of weight and conventional utility to them — these aren't fancy sci-fi superweapons, these are the mundane (if highly advanced) weapons that relatively recently replaced tanks in general service in just the last decade. And you are a grunt pilot, stuck in the quagmire of the war. Nothing's clean or shiny, and the whole atmosphere of the game is constructed to feel more like World War 1 & 2, but with giant robots. If it manages to evoke feelings of storming Omaha Beach, or hunkering in a trench in Verdun, while the entire time you're in a 18-20 meter tall mechanical monster spitting similar death right back at the enemy, they've done it right.

A Gundam Game to hammer home Tomino's War Is Hell message.

Less Battle Operation 2 and more Battlefield 1. But again, with giant robots.

#video games #gundam #mobile suits #one year war #0079: Rise From Ashes

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s3znl-gr3znl · 6 months

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Tch, you're pretty good. But once I've memorized your attack pattern, we're making out sloppy style

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elviejopotter · 1 year

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I'm planning to get more models in May, but till I became financial stable again, I bought this entry grade gundam.

#gundam #mecha #retro anime #anime and manga #modeling #gunpla #gundam universal century #char's counterattack #amuro ray #v gundam #rx 93 #the witch from mercury #mobile suit gundam #mobile suits #entry grade #robots

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wordsandrobots · 10 months

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IBO reference notes on . . . the aesthetics of the mobile frame

I'm having a rough time writing this week (I just need to torture Gaelio some more, why is this so haaaard?!) so here's something to keep my hand in regardless. I had a couple of posts planned on the mobile suits of the Post Disaster setting, one about the meanings applied to Gundams – which I shall complete at some point because it's interesting – and one ranking the various 'suits using criteria such as 'excellent round boy, no notes' – which I'm likely to ditch because it's quite boring. But thinking about that got me considering the reasons I clicked hard with IBO's art direction in the first place. So let's look into why it causes my brain to make so many pleasing whirring noises.

A distinction that makes a difference

To start with, this is in contrast to other Gundam series' aesthetics. While I have a certain fondness for the Gundam Wing designs and I enjoy the way the Dauntless, Valiant, etc. reimagine the Universal Century stalwarts for Gundam X, most iterations' mobile suits are firmly 'OK' for me. Neither very interesting, nor something I find anything in to especially dislike.

Iron-Blooded Orphans, however, introduces a concept that sets it apart: the mobile frame. That is, each mecha is built around a base skeleton that is the 'true' machine; everything else is modular and interchangeable. As far as I can tell, this is the only series in the franchise to do this. Other Gundam shows expose inner workings from time to time, but these are usually unique to a particular model of 'suit. Whereas in IBO, multiple different types of 'suit can share the same kind of frame.

Moreover, the fact they are built around an inner frame is made explicit in the art, so the 'suits look – slightly daft as it may sound – much more mechanical than, say, your average UC mecha. These are things approximating the human form, not something you can replicate with a guy in a costume, and that makes them appear somewhat less fanciful and slightly more like actual military hardware.

Which is a cheat, obviously. It's tweaking a genre convention to fit a particular tone: this is not a show in which 'suits are going to start magically bending time and space; it's the one in which they beat seven shades of brick-dust out of each other with giant lumps of metal. Fundamentally, these are no less silly than the more 'filled in' designs that came before. It just appeals to me to see the illusion being given extra depth.

But there's more to it than that.

Atoms of design

Several different types of mobile frame appear in IBO – eight, to be exact: Rodi, Hexa, Gundam, Valkyrja, Geirail, Graze, Teiwaz/Io, and Reginlaze (I count the Teiwaz and Io frames as one since they are functionally identical). These are all visually distinct and easy to distinguish when placed in the finished mobile suits. Yet they also share a common root element: the Ahab reactor.

Most Gundam shows have some sort of wibble-physics black-box to explain why giant humanoid robots are a sensible means of warfare. In the P.D. timeline, this takes the form of 'Ahab particles' that are generated by some form of quantum nonsense inside a drum-shaped reactor. The particles create pseudo-gravity and EM waves that interfere with communications and tracking, and the reactors are effectively infinite batteries, so we get artificial gravity and inertial control, comms black-outs and stealth in space, and the necessary wattage to power a mecha, all for the price of one.

That's the technobabble, anyway. Practically speaking, the Ahab reactor is a design element that must be integrated into each of the mobile frames. And I love this. I love setting arbitrary little rules and using them to create a coherent aesthetic. Because now each frame needs to have a big drum shape in it somewhere (or two, to create the Gundam frame's unique silhouette). A unifying commonality that still permits wide variation.

It's not always necessary to have designs reflect a concept of shared technology. That depends on what the story is doing. Witch From Mercury, for example, explicitly has multiple branches of mobile suit design on display at once, to delineate between 'suits produced by different companies. However, I enjoy the way IBO emphasises that the various mecha are all applications of the same base technology, especially as it gets at something easy to overlook about how the world is set up.

You see, while the Gundams get the reputation as these massively powerful weapons from a lost past, that is true of the majority of non-Gjallarhorn mobile suits. Rodis and Hexas are the most common frames and both predate the Gundam frame's development. Everyone who isn't Gjallarhorn or Teiwaz is using machinery at least 300 years old, never mind that it might be covered in brand new armour.

Those space pirates raiding ships in the Jupiter-sphere? The colonists trying to seize control of their living conditions? That country hurriedly upgrading its military for a modern challenge? They're all recycling the same frames that fought the war out of which the systems they're currently struggling to live with extend. It's incredibly thematically resonant, not to mention pretty close to the truth of the things IBO is assaying in its fiction.

Visceral shorthand

However, I think the most clever thing about the mobile frame model is the way it lends itself to in-the-moment storytelling. Having established the skeletons underlying each mecha, the show can freely expose them as required to demonstrate exactly how badly a fight is going.

IBO abandons the lightsabers and laser-guns of its predecessor shows in favour of a more grounded and brutal approach to combat. That is to say: thanks to additional technobabble, breaking through the armour of a mobile suit requires either something very sharp, going very fast, or something very heavy, also going very fast. Swords, clubs, maces, and heavy-gauge bullets are the order of the day, leading to a lot of crumpling and crushing, and more specifically, bits of armour being ripped off the frame.

It's a great shorthand for 'oh that was a hit', applied generously to all sides, to emphasise the damage being done while also making it clear the machines can technically still function in such a state. Barbatos actively starts out extra-skeletal, while 'suits like the Reginlaze Julia keep going when stripped of their surface layer. Even the unfortunate Graze Ritter on the back of which Mikazuki surf-boards down from orbit is visibly coming apart around its frame, underlining how tough the cores of these things are.

Furthermore, it increases the sense that the human component of a mobile suit is extremely frail by comparison. When you a have weapons structured around extremely durable inner workings, it draws attention to the vulnerability of the cockpit. Because in most of the frames, that's part of what goes on top. Rodi and Io frames have integrated control cabins, but the rest do not. On most of them, the pilot sits at what is nominally the most heavily protected section (the chest), but in fact, they are a little way in front of the piece that can be actively relied on not to break (the reactor).

Or to put it another way: a mobile suit pilot is visibly more likely to die in battle before the war machine they are strapped to does. Skewering the cockpit with something pointy is a deeply feasible strategy, and that vulnerability stems from design limitations imposed by the chosen structure of the mecha. The reactor has to go somewhere central. The mobile suit is built around a set frame. The armour will detach before the limbs break. So on and so forth, ad drill-knees, underscoring how cheap life is next to the hardware of war.

Making it about bones

To sum up, it's a neat concept, well executed. Mobile frames allow for visual coherence while permitting design variation and customisation. They are used to underscore the brutality of the combat, adding weight to blow-by-blow animation and to the general sense of danger for the cast. And they make IBO's mecha stand out from the pack, which to me is a big mark in their favour.

There's another point that delights me too, one I can best illustrate with some images. If you look at the at the Calamity War era frames, you'll see that the Rodi (left) and Hexa (centre) are both heavily robotic in outline. They have complex hands but are otherwise quite blocky, with very inhuman heads. The Gundam frame (right), however, has a more organic design, its points of movement more closely corresponding to the human body, and (uniquely) two eyes placed about where you'd expect.

Now clearly the Gundam is inheriting franchise design considerations (the 'man in a suit' look of the '79 cartoon) but within the fiction, it works brilliantly with the conceit of Gundams perfecting the man/machine interface. Of course it looks closer to a person; it's meant to be a more natural extension of the pilot than the frames that came earlier, to enable the split-second timing and instinctive movement required to beat the mobile armours.

We also see this running in the opposite direction. The Valkyrja (far left) is actually closer to the Gundam's sensibilities than its other contemporaries (it was developed at the same time), but its successors, the Geirail and then Graze, are even more robotic than the Rodi and Hexa, with considerably simplified structures. Even the hands are much more chunky and functional.

The narrative is both of a technological decline and of the requirements of mass-production. In the post-War society, mobile suit combat is less of an issue, so the 'suits don't need to be as complex. It's only when Gjallarhorn's position as top-dog in the solar system is threatened that they invest in something closer to the Valkyrja, with the Reginlaze (far right) being designed to allow a non-augmented pilot to compete with things like Gundam Barbatos.

I really like that degree of thought and detail in something that isn't especially relevant to the story, but adds to it once you know about it.